Full text of "Edge Gaming"

See other formats

ТА
PLAYSTATION
mal

20TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION

RA INMENT
[12/63 ог

THE FUT.

TWENTY —
YEARS OF
PLAYSTATION -
HOW PS1 INVENTED - а.ө,” Жа? | Р a ‘
THE MODERN T WA es г Ж оол 1 | E
VIDEOGAME | ЖЕНЕ NER. ON ||! 20%

1 CAN CHRISROBERTS’ | 4 а
COLOSSAL RETURN! TO.GAMES 1
WIN THE SPACE RACE? ;

= B A i

REVIEWED
CALL OF DUTY:
ADVANCED WARFARE
LITTLEBIGPLANET 3
SUNSET OVERDRIVE

PLAYSTATION TV
ON TEST
LORDS OF THE FALLEN |

| | | THE MAKING OF
N ЕАЫ ТН EN #274 | NO MORE HEROES

Views from the launchpad

"We do recognise Sony as a major player. It's just that we're confident
that we know videogames better than anyone, and we feel supremely
confident that at every technical turn the Ultra 64 is a superior machine to
the PlayStation, and will offer a greater gaming experience." When Peter
Main, who for 15 years served as Nintendo Of America's executive VP of
sales and marketing, said this in late 1994, Sony's PlayStation had only
just been released into the world, and even then only to the Japanese
market. While attempting to brush Sony's offering aside, in reality the
statement revealed how seriously the game industry's established players
were taking this new competition. An aspiring rival that supposedly falls so
far short of the mark isn't even worth the recognition of discussion in
public. Only legitimate threats deserve that kind of attention.

Outside of Nintendo, others were more generous with their appraisals
of Sony's work, while also offering their own warnings. "The PlayStation is
very strong, but Sony has absolutely no experience in this market, and the
games market really is like no other," Atari's Darryl Still declared. "You
can't just come in and buy market share. You have to build it."

And build it Sony famously did. In this issue, 20 years on, we look at
what the company's fresh perspective brought to the game industry, via
firsiperson accounts from people who were there at the time. It’s our
biggest feature of the year, reflecting the size of the impact PlayStation
had on players, on game development, and on Sony's competitors.

Competition is one of the crucial factors keeping the videogame industry
moving forward, which brings us to our cover story. If you've been paying
attention, you'll have seen Elite: Dangerous on the cover of E264 and No
Man's Sky heading up E270, so it should feel appropriate that we
complete the trilogy with Star Citizen this issue. In our lead feature, we talk
to developer Cloud Imperium about its own spin on deep-space adventure.

james

e Play

attlefield Hardline 104 Sunset Overdrive

50, PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox One Xbox One

attleborn 108 LittleBigPlanet 3

, PS4, Xbox One PS4

caraway Unfolded 112 Call Of Duty:

4 Advanced Warfare

360, PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox One
uyo Puyo Tetris
54, Xbox One 114 The Evil Within
360, PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox One
here Came An Echo
, Xbox One 116 Lords Of The Fallen
PC, PS4, Xbox One

118 Sid Meier's
Civilization:
Beyond Earth
PC

120 The Legend Of Korra
360, PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox One

ype Roundup

122 Fantasia:
Music Evolved
360, Xbox One

Explore the iPad Follow these links
edition of Edge for throughout the magazine
additional content for more content online

8 PlayStation TV on test
Sony's diminutive PlayStation box
gets off to a problematic start

12 Heavenly creatures
Hellblade heralds a new era of
development for Ninja Theory

14 Farming for gold
Giants Software on bringing
Farming Simulator to consoles

16 Fear factor
We investigate the revival
of Japanese horror games

18 Bird watch

Luna, Funomena's beautiful puzzle
game, prepares to take flight

20 Soundbytes
Shuhei Yoshida talks DriveClub;
Pete Hines addresses Prey 2

22 My Favourite Game
Susan Calman on evangelising
games and renting Resident Evil

SONY

#274

CHRISTMAS 2014

24 This Month On Edge

The things that caught our eye
during the production of E274

Dispatches
26 Dialogue

Edge readers share their opinions;
one wins SteelSeries hardware

28 Trigger Happy
Steven Poole considers the power
of abstraction and sandy expanses

30 Difficulty Switch
lan Bogost is concerned about
the future of sharing on the sofa

32 Big Picture Mode
Nathan Brown discovers a rare
breed of online player in Destiny

129 Postcards From

The Clipping Plane
James Leach on the pitfalls of
trying too hard not to offend

58 Space Craft

We edge Star Citizen out of the
hangar and speak to the team
behind the ambitious space sim

68 PlayStation: The Story
Behind The Brand

Two decades on from launch,

we look at how Sony created

its world-beating game console

Ian

sections `

88 Collected Works

A new, occasional series in which
creators talk us through their careers.
To begin: Insomniac's Ted Price

94 The Making Of...
Suda51 explains how his team
fused slacker attitude with
swordplay in No More Heroes

98 Studio Profile

From the small-scale Child Of
Light to the sprawling Far Cry
4: inside Ubisoft Montreal

124 Time Extend

A microwave ray has tried San
Francisco! Time for a return visit
to PlatinumGames' Vanquish

Fr,
ry j

i gE

EDGE

EDITORIAL
Tony Mott editor in chief Nathan Brown deputy editor
Ben Maxwell writer Matthew Clapham production editor
Mark Wynne senior art editor Andrew Hind art editor

CONTRIBUTORS
lan Bogost, Richard Cobbett, Martin Davies, Edwin Evans-Thirlwell, Phil lwaniuk, James Leach, Alice Liang,
Matthew Pellett, Simon Parkin, Steven Poole, Daniel Robson, Chris Schilling, Chris Thursten, Alvin Weetman

ADVERTISING

Steve Turner account manager (steve.turner@futurenet.com]

SUBSCRIPTIONS
UK reader order line and enquiries 0844 8482852
Overseas reader order line and enquiries +44 (0)1504 250145
Online enquiries at www.myfavouritemagazines.com
Email edgeQmyfavouritemagazines.co.uk

MARKETING

Laura Driffield group marketing manager Kristianne Stanton marketing manager

CIRCULATION
Juliette Winyard trade marketing manager +44 (0)7551 150984

LICENSING
Regina Erak senior licensing and syndication manager (regina.erak@futurenet.com)
Tel: +44 (0]1225 442244 Fax: +44 (0]1225 732275

PRODUCTION & DISTRIBUTION

Mark Constance production manager Frances Twentyman production controller

MANAGEMENT
Daniel Dawkins group editor in chief Graham Dalzell group art director
Declan Gough head of content and marketing, film, music and games
Nial Ferguson content and marketing director

Printed in the UK by William Gibbons & Sons on behalf of Future. Distributed in the UK by Seymour Distribution Ltd,
2 East Poultry Avenue, London, EC1A 9PT (+44 (0)20 74294000). Overseas distribution by Seymour International

All submissions to Edge are made on the basis of a licence to publish the submission in Edge magazine and its licensed editions worldwide. Any material

submitted is sent at the owner's risk and, although every care is taken, neither Future Publishing Limited nor its agents shall be liable for loss or damage. All contents

Future Publishing Ltd 2014. While we make every effort possible to ensure that everything we print is factually correct, we cannot be held responsible if factual
errors occur. Please check any quoted prices and specs with your supplier before purchase. Hey, thank you to everyone who voted for us! We love you all.

All contents copyright © 2014 Future Publishing Limited or published under licence. All rights reserved. No part of this magazine
may be reproduced, stored, transmitted or used in any way without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Future Publishing Limited (company number 2008885) is registered in England and Wales. Registered office: Quay House, The Ambury, Bath BA1 1UA.
All information contained in this publication is for information only and is, as far as we are aware, correct at the time of going to press. Future cannot accept

any responsibility for errors or inaccuracies in such information. You are advised to contact manufacturers and retailers directly with regard to the price and other
details of products or services referred to in this publication. Apps and websites mentioned in this publication are not under our control. We are not responsible
for their contents or any changes or updates to them. If you submit unsolicited material to us, you automatically grant Future a licence to publish your submission

MIX

Paper from
responsible sources

FSC" С007184

whole or in part in all editions of the magazine, including licensed editions worldwide and in any physical or digital format throughout the world. Any material
you submit is sent at your risk and, although every care is taken, neither Future nor its employees, agents or subcontractors shall be liable for loss or damage.

Want to work for Future? Visit www.futurenet.com/jobs

Future, Quay House, The Ambury,
Bath ВАТ ТУА United Kingdom
Telephone: +44 (0)1225 442244
Fax: +44 (0)1225 732275

Future is ап award-winning international media
group and leading digital business. We reach more

than 49 million international consumers a month

We are committed ta only using magazine paper Print 14,351

RE and create world-class content and advertising ek Lu КЕ КӨШЕР ег
which is derived from well managed, сегігінкі solutions for passionate consumers online, on tablet Digital 6,134 ——— ت‎
p ; g
forestry igi ierit a Future & smartphone and in print. Vi | М М F m
Рио waar LpA have been Ж ا ا‎ MM ү | Wi |
Ursi gel lg i e in аена i Н Future ple is a public Chief executive Zillah Byng-Maddick
ru Forest Stewardshig Counci). company quoted Non-executive chairman Peter Allen ; А »- НЕЕ
on the London Chief financial officer Richard Haley The ABC combined print; digital and digital
Stock Exchange publication circulation for Jan-Dec 2013 is E А
recycle (symbol: FUTR). Tel +44 (0)207 042 4000 (London) 20,485 Specialist Magazine
Еныљыі www.futureplc.com Tel +44 (0)1225 442 244 (Bath
m zs erie ааа A member of the Audited Bureau of Circulations Of The Year

INSERT COIN www.insertcoinclothing.com

Hazuki, Shenmue

DUS Second Son

Official limited edition gamer-wear
since 2010.

E Finalist

== WORLDWIDE Awards
DELIVERY! | 2014

The market for computer & video games

CODE: DECEDGE14

KNOWLEDGE
PLAYSTATION TV

Announced as a PS4
launch title, DriveClub
hit shelves last month
with networking issues
that rendered its social
features unusable

A TV model in
need of tuning

The launch of PlayStation TV and ongoing DriveClub

issues reveal some old problems lingering at Sony

F^ its Japanese release last year, it
was branded as PS Vita TV, and no
wonder. What arrives in the west bearing
the more massmarket name PlayStation TV
is clearly a Vita in slender clothing, with
the same OS, menus and Home screen
music. Yet where Vita itself is large by
handheld standards — more showy
hardware design trom a company famous
for it = PSTV is almost amusingly small.
Measuring a mere бх1Ост, it's just tall
enough for the rear fo accommodate an
Ethernet cable, an HDMI
cable, USB drive and Vita
memory card, plus the
power supply. On the side
sits a slot for card-based
Vita games. It was the
headline feature for a
device that launched in
Japan four months before
PS4, but Р5ТУ5 role in the
west is very different. The
£85 device forms a third pillar of Sony's
gaming strategy that, on paper at least, is
ripe with potential: a low-cost My First
PlayStation that launches with a vast
library of games from across Sony's two
decades in the videogame business.

On a big screen,
games are cut
back from their full
splendour, capped
at 720p and 30

frames per second

Currently, the big selling point is
Remote Play, allowing streaming of PSA
games over a local network or the
Internet. It's never been perfect, but its
flaws have been easier to forgive given
the thrill of playing a PS3 game on the
move, using a device with an OLED
screen that does a fine job of tidying up
variable video data. On PSTV, things are
different: you're playing on a big screen,
albeit one in the bedroom, and games
are cut back from their full splendour,
capped at 720p and 30
frames per second. In our
tests, even with both
Р54 and PSTV wired into
a home network as per
Sony's recommendation,
enough input latency was
introduced to render
Destiny and Sleeping
Dogs: Definitive Edition
uncomfortable, if not
unplayable, with artefacting sullying
busier moments. Our hopes that things
would improve when running a less
graphically intensive game were dashed
when Rogue legacy performed similarly.

Luckily, a Cross Play-enabled Vita
version of that game exists, and when
thought of as a Vita with HDMI out and
support for DualShocks 3 and 4, PSTV
makes more sense. The system upscales
from Vita's 960x544 resolution to a
maximum of 1080i, and while the scaler
isn't best in class, it doesn't diminish the
satisfaction of playing on an HDTV and
a sofa games designed for a five-inch
screen. The thought of continuing the
commute’s Persona 4 Golden run on the
big screen of an evening is an enticing
one, as is playing a game ill-suited to

Vita's small screen and analogue sticks —
a shooter, say — on a bigger display and
with a DualShock in your hands.

If only We could. Persona 4 Golden
was one of the few games that actually
ran during our test, with PSTV's lack of
touchscreen support sounding the death
knell for a chunk of the Vita catalogue.
While we didn't expect to be able to
play Tearaway and other games built
around Vita's swollen featureset, nor did
we expect error messages when trying to
load firstparty big-hitters such as Gravity
Rush or Uncharted: Golden Abyss.

Even games that use the touchscreen
in superfluous, optional ways fall foul of
this limitation. If you want to play Lumines:
Electronic Symphony or Everybody's Golf:
VVorld Tour, you're out of luck. Street
Fighter X Tekken, which lets you map
specialmove inputs and button combos to
quadrants of the front touchscreen and
rear panel, but is perfectly playable with
traditional sticks and buttons, is another
that simply refuses to load. While some
newer games have been made functional
by patches, older games have been
ignored. Of the 1 1 games available at
Vita's UK launch in February 2012, only
one, Evolution Studios’ MotorStorm RC,
works. Six of the current top ten sellers on
Amazon are supported, which still doesn't
feel like enough. Fortunately, Sony has
secured support for what might be the
only game that matters.

Р5ТУ5 potential as a Minecraft box
could be critical. It is the most popular
game going with the demographic at
which PSTV is aimed, and at under £100
for the system and a download copy of
the game, it offers the cheapest голе №

PlayStation TV arrived in the
UK on November 14. It's £85
and bundled with download
codes for OlliOlli, Velocity
Ultra and Worms Revolution
Extreme. For all its faults,
the device may get a boost
when the PlayStation Now
streaming service launches

KNOWLEDGE
PLAYSTATION TV

FAST FRIENDS
While Sony's lax
attitude to PS4
firmware updates
compared to its rival
can be given a positive
spin by pointing out
that there was much
more that needed
fixing in Xbox One's
launch dashboard, by
the time PS4 system
software 2.0 arrived,
the system's OS was
beginning to struggle.
Friends lists and new
messages could take
a couple of minutes
to load in, and it was
pleasing to see that
the October firmware
update sped things up
a little in addition to
bringing new features
such as YouTube
uploads and Share
Play's virtual local
multiplayer. Much
work remains to

be done, however,
particularly on how
games are arranged
on the main menu.
That horizontally
scrolling list has
become rather bulky
to navigate as PS4's
library has grown, and
Sony's latest solution
- having 15 recently
used items on the
Home screen, with
everything else in the
Library submenu -
doesn't quite cut it.

to fulHat Minecraft on the market. With
that in mind, it's staggering that the two
haven't been bundled together for launch;
the £85 bundle comes with download
codes for OlliOlli, Velocity Ultra and, for
reasons that presumably made sense to
somebody along the line, Worms
Revolution Extreme. A Minecraft bundle
has to follow at some point — at least
assuming that Microsoft, Mojang's new
owner, has been honest in its promise not
to block the game from appearing on
other platforms — but having one on
shelves for Christmas could have made
all the difference.

Yet regardless of compatibility
issues, PSTV's support for PST, PSP and
PS Mini releases means it launches with a
library of some 700 games, giving it a
clear competitive advantage over other
seHop boxes. That, it turns out, is just as
well given how far PSTV lags behind the
likes of Apple TV, Chromecast and
Amazons Fire TV as a media box. While
a Netflix app was on the PlayStation
Store when Vita launched in North
America almost three years ago, it has
never made it to Europe. As such, PSTV
launches in the UK with no support for the
world's most popular subscription video
service. Amazon Instant Video, BBC
iPlayer, YouTube and Now TV — all, like
Netflix, available in app form on PS3
and PS4 — are absent trom the PSTV
store. Bafflingly, you're even forbidden
from accessing the PS4 versions of
the apps over Remote Play, the system
throwing up an error message and then
booting you unceremoniously back to
the PS4 Home menu.

It's all a bit confusing. Settop boxes
should be simple to set up and easy to
use. While PSTV's setup is straightforward
enough, the problems begin the minute
you sit back and start using the thing. It
is an irresistible idea in theory, and a
fine bit of industrial design too, but it is
blemished by substandard software
support. It is, in that sense, a perfect
metaphor for the current state of Sony.

After Microsoft spent most of
2013 leaving its goal untended and

gently ushering Sony towards it, the latter
half of 2014 has been very different.

DriveClub, the game Sony used to dull
the pain of charging for online multiplayer
on PSA by offering a cuFdown version

of the title to PS Plus subscribers, has
endured a disastrous launch. The only
thing saving it from reaching Sim City
and Diablo Ill levels of shame is the fact
that it can still be played in singleplayer
when the servers are down. However, at
the time of writing, the game has been on
shelves for almost a month
and it remains an almost
entirely offline pursuit. The
long-promised PS Plus
Edition, meanwhile, has
been delayed indefinitely.

It is a sorry tale for
Evolution Studios, whose
supposed Р54 launch
game was 11 months late
onto shelves and then
arrived stripped of key features by
network troubles. But Sony's response —
or lack of it = is the more damning part. It
took three weeks for Worldwide Studios
president Shuhei Yoshida to acknowledge
the problem, while senior Evolution staff,
who were open on social media during
development, fell suddenly silent.

Sony's network problems extend far
beyond DriveClub, however. While
extended periods of PSN downtime
for 'scheduled maintenance' were an
inconvenience in the PS3 era, they are

There's little wrong
that isn't fixable,
but who, given
Sony's current
form, would expect
it to be fixed?

PlayStation TV's slender,
6x10cm form factor is
just big enough for all
the necessary ports on
its rear. The power
button @ can be
ignored once you've
synced a DualShock 3
or 4 to the device, since
it can be woken from
standby by pressing the
controller's PlayStation
button. Next to it are
ports for a Vita memory
card @, USB drive Ө,
HDMI cable @, Ethernet
cable and power

supply Û. A flap on
the side of the device

conceals a slot for
PlayStation Vita game
cards, and the device
also has 1GB of
onboard storage to
hold your game and
media downloads.

unforgivable now that Sony is charging
for its service. Once a month, Sony takes
down its £40-per-year online service for
up to eight hours, taking with it always-
online games like Destiny, the multiplayer
component of many more titles and, in
our experience, blocking access to digital
purchases because PSN refuses the
console's handshake to check for the
proper licences. The network has a
recurring DDOS problem -
one recent attack was
conducted specifically to
show that Sony has not
invested in improved
network protection — and
since Destiny's launch in
early September, PS4 users
have had to endure five
protracted periods of
downtime, only one

of which was planned for.

It affects PSTV, too. A bug in PS4
system software 2.0 - the consoles first
substantial firmware update since launch
— meant its standby mode, for some
reason renamed Rest mode in the update,
didn't work properly, shutting the console
down fully after a time, and even locking
up the unit. Remote Play only works if the
PSA is in Rest mode, so our tests meant a
few disconsolate trips back downstairs to
turn on the machine by hand. Version
2.01 followed a week later to fix the

As a Minecraft box, PSTV
may still entice a younger
audience and those seeking
a low-cost point of entry

problem, but a week is a long time to
solve a systemdocking bug. And none of
this inspires confidence in PlayStation
Now, the on-demand streaming service
that in its current beta state uses exorbitant
rental pricing rather than subscriptions,
and which will not function at all when | Agira 1 ار‎
Sony's server infrastructure falls over. aie NL aoe ТА” ДЫҚ” 53
With all this in mind, it's little surprise
that a bite-sized device full of potential
should launch beset with so many
seemingly avoidable issues. There's little
wrong with PSTV that isn't fixable, but
who, given Sony's current form, would

Not all Vita games
are upscaled from
the handheld’s native
| 960x544 to match
expect it to be fixed? Sony has long been the resolution of your

HDTV's display. Some,
including Killzone:
Mercenary and the Vita
port of Borderlands 2,
have been updated to run
in native 10801. It's a
welcome move, but a
limited one, and further
reinforces the perception
that the device has been
released before it was
ready. Sony says it is
working with partners

to get more Vita games
up and running, and on
securing media apps
such as Netflix too, but
PlayStation TV is hard

to recommend until

excellent at hardware and poor at
software solutions, and while its masterful
Р54 marketing convinced millions of
players that the company had changed,
apparently behind the scenes still lurks a
litany of ancient problems. Microsoft,
meanwhile, updates the Xbox One
interface once a month, has cleared out
much of the executive deadwood that
almost ruined the console before it had
even launched, and has started making
all the right noises to its audience.

Sony's latest fiscal update boasted of

"a significant increase in network services
revenue related to the introduction of the

PSA". |t is time to start spending it on Given how Tearaway (above) uses Vita's touch, tilt, cameras and microphone, we didn't ever those discussions bear
bos i | карк hal expect it to run on PSTV, but Street Fighter X Tekken failing to work was an unpleasant fruit, especially to those
Se MO: ше: SIE е M surprise. The same holds for a number of other games with limited touchscreen dependance. who already own
revenue, and quickly. Шш Patches may be forthcoming, but it's something of a lottery as to which titles are supported both a Vita and PS4.
EDGE

KNOWLEDGE
HELLBLADE

Heavenly
creatures

Why Ninja Theory is treating Hellblade's

development as a new era for the studio

he past 18 months have involved a lot
of soul searching for Ninja Theory. In
Heavenly Sword and Enslaved: Odyssey
Io The West, the studio has worked with
worlds that it's desperate to revisit. But
with no offers trom its publishers to do so,
and with work on DmC: Devil May Cry
drawing to a close as well, last year the
studio decided to create new IP instead.
Multiple pitches were constructed
and rejected. A horror game created in
tandem with 28 Days Later screenwriter
Alex Garland was dismissed because the
horror genre “wasn't popular enough".
A contemporary co-op and story based
title, again in partnership with Garland,
was also turned down, though not before
it was suggested the grounded characters
were swapped out for
soldiers on Mars in order
to make it more palatable.
"The only way to
design a product for the
new platforms seemed to
be to focus on the things
that sell and then replicate
them," explains studio
cofounder Tameem
Antoniades. "Which isn't
then a creative endeavour, it's hard graft."
For a successful pitch in today's
climate, Antoniades believes publishers
need to guarantee sales of "about four or
tive million" — numbers that don't match
up with the projected sales of the games
Ninja Theory wants to build. And it's for
this reason that its new game, Hellblade,
has three important words cut into its
reveal trailer: an independent game.
"Hellblade is about us creating
something that's ours," Antoniades says.
"We can steer it into the future, be its
protector and shepherd it. Hellblade is
not funded by our other projects. We're
putting mostly our own money into this.”

“Hellblade is not
funded by our
other projects.
We're putting
mostly our own
money into this”

Development began in March, and
selHunding meant going from a team
size of over 80 to just 13 people, though
two other concurrent projects mitigated
the need to downsize the studio.

"We have traditionally created a lot
ot bespoke content and a lot of setpieces
in our games,” says Dominic Matthews,
product development manager. “The
challenge for us with a smaller team is
working in a smarter way. Our approach
to this game is to get as much value out
of the people that we've got."

For instance, the game's sole
environment artist has been given the
freedom to create the world before any
other mechanics have been finalised; in
the past, environments were always
created to serve a fixed
script. And if sensible
opportunities to recycle
work arise, such as rolling
creature animation into
the environment's general
malevolence, it helps the
artist build an even richer
world without extra effort.

"Every [enemy] does
attack moves," says
technical art director Stuart Adcock.

"If we can take certain frames from an
attack move and stitch them together, we
can make interesting sculptures for the
world that feel quite hellish by reusing
some of the work effort that we've put in."

One core area of costsaving is a
new approach to performance capture.
“It's an incredibly expensive thing to do,
but you get incredible quality out of doing
it,” says Matthews. "We're currently in
the process of thinking, ‘How do we do
this? How do we get the same results
but without the huge expenditure?"

Homebrew appears to be the answer,
with the studio's biggest meeting room

Tameem Antoniades,
co-founder of Ninja
Theory, also serves
as the chief creative
director for Hellblade

converted into a makeshift capture area
full of GoPro cameras, phones and Ikea-
sourced poles, with team members test
running the setup while sporting self
printed sticky-backed markers.

All this experimentation is contained
within the Hellblade project in the hope
that success will deliver a blueprint for
future titles. "If we can prove that this one
works and that it can be a success, | think
tunding opportunities will come easier
over time," says Antoniades. "Some of
that might be to go to publishers like
they're distributors in the same way as
independent movies: they'd advance
some of the money to make it, you'd
put in some of your own money, and
you're still in control of what happens."

Antoniades readily admits the
studios still trying to work out the business
strategy. In its latest development diary,
the team asked potential fans what
merchandise they want to buy to help
fund development, and at GDC Europe
Antoniades announced an initiative in
partnership with Epic to create online
classes and workshops for university
students and hobbyists interested in the
development process. But for Ninja
Theory's cofounder, this project is a
chance to cultivate a future in which

he can take more creative risks - and
for other studios to learn from Ninja
Theory's ultimate triumph or failure.

"| want the industry to be a good
place where creative studios are making
good, fun games, and it's competitive
and it's exciting and there's a spark to it.
It's not pleasant that so many studios have
gone under. It doesn't make us feel like,
‘A-ha! We're standing! We're surviving!’
It's a miserable landscape. You should
be able to earn a decent living making
good, fun things that people want." B

While visions of combat and enemies
dominate early concept art (right,
main, below right), Hellblade will
also feature geometric puzzles that
ask you to assemble environmental
details through camera manipulation

Matthews claims Hellblade wouldn't exist if not for a recent shift in platform holders' approach
to digital titles: "Five years ago, those doors just weren't open to us." As it stands, the game
has to sell between 200,000 and 300,000 copies in order to earn back its development budget

On prior hardware, Ninja
Theory built a reputation
by partnering with the
likes of Alex Garland

and Andy Serkis. Despite
Hellblade's budget,
product development
manager Dominic
Matthews is confident

the trend can continue.
"We're looking at this
like independent film,"

he explains. "Certain
movies have become

big successes on smaller
budgets, and there's talent
out there that wants to
work on those projects
because it's a change
from big blockbuster
work. We offer something
attractive to [that] talent,
because when we work
with someone we work
with them very closely,
and give them free rein."

А HI mam 2$ pu

ТАТ | m ІШІ жш =
АТТА Бе umi

7 WU m | -. “hed Шен

FARMING

How Giants Software is bringing PC

cult hit Farming Simulator to consoles

S of Steam's most surprising
statistics come not from the likes of
Dota 2, Skyrim or PlanetSide 2, but
Farming Simulator 2013. At the time of
writing it boasts more active players than
Alien: Isolation, has a higher peak player
count than Final Fantasy ХІІ, and enjoys
some 2,400 positive player reviews to
just 167 negative ones, several of which
are apparently confused about what the
game set out to achieve.

Farming Simulator is, however, just
part of a surge of seemingly mundane
simulations over recent years, including
the likes of Euro Truck Simulator, Ski
Region Simulator, and Warehouse And
logistics Simulator (complete with the
unforgettably named DIC Hell's
Warehouse). Many have
proven surprisingly popular,
with Euro Truck Simulator 2
in particular finding a
sizeable niche thanks to the
effort put into simulating the
freedom of the open road.

But Giants Software's
Farming Simulator 15 will
be the first to try to break
into the current console
generation, jumping from PC to both
Р54 and Xbox One in 2015. "There
aren't many simulation games on the
consoles, so there are a lot of mixed
opinions about whether it will be
successful or not," Giants CEO Christian
Ammann admits. "We have our own
approach to simulation games. We tried
to shake out the dust that is in this genre
from the very technical, heavy simulations
like Flight Simulator. Our approach was
to make it far more accessible."

Perhaps Giant's timing couldn't be
better. After all, Minecraft has shown that
you can put a price on player creativity,
and that price is two-and-a-half billion

"In the end, we
don't have to
compete. We
have our own
dimension, like
Minecraft has"

dollars. Games such as Animal Crossing,
Harvest Moon and FarmVille show there's
an enduring appetite for light lite and
livestock management, but genre fans
can also come from unexpected corners.
The response to World Of Warcraft's
optional farm in the Mists Of Pandaria
expansion led to Blizzard devoting a
chunk of Warlords Of Draenor to
something similar — albeit in the form

of a military garrison.

"We see quite a lot of different
players, so we have the hardcore fans,
some of whom are really farmers. Others
are kids; we have a lot of kids playing
with their parents," Ammann says. "And
we've got really core gamers who play
Call Of Duty and Battlefield as well, who
just like playing Farming
Simulator at some points
because it's relaxing."

That audience puts
Giants in a tricky position
when it comes to realism.
Even CTO Stefan Geiger
agrees it can be hard sell:
"he first time you hear it,
you think, well, ‘Farming?
Маһ." So much of the
work that goes into the game is about
cutting to the appeal of the job, and not
being too restricted by details. “I'd say
that one of the benefits of the games is
to achieve things faster than in the real
world. It's important that it's quicker."

"For some, it's superunrealistic what
we do, and for others it's superrealistic,
and it always depends on what you
want to compare," Ammann says.

"If you compare Farming Simulator to
FarmVille, sure, it's superrealistic. But
if you compare it to the real world, it's
still simplified. Growing a field takes
half a year: that's something we have
to speed up."

Farming for gold

Christian Ammann,
CEO, Giants Software

BUSMAN'S
HOLIDAY

There's no more
demanding audience
for any simulator than
the people who do the
job for real, and Giants
has no shortage of
farmers who get home
from a long day and
relax by playing
Farming Simulator.
They're not, however,
its core audience. "We
have a lot, but in the
end it's the same as
with professional
pilots and Flight
Simulator," says
Ammann. "They're
important, and they
are also the guys who
give us the feedback
for the improvements
for new versions and
addon content, but
they're not a big
enough audience to
sell a game to." This
doesn't necessarily
mean a casual fanbase,
though - over 33 per
cent of players have
clocked up over ten
hours in a single
savegame according
to Steam stats, and
for many that's just

a start. "Sometimes
it's scary how much
people play," says
Ammann. "One guy
had an accumulated
time of four months
just seven months
after release. He

must have played

it all the time!"

Instead, Giants creates longevity
through a career mode and tries to
convey the feel of reality without ever
restricting players when it comes to real
life's more tedious elements. In particular,
help with the latter comes from licensing,
partnerships, and getting real-world
vehicles into the sim, much as a racing
game studio might court car makers.
^With the partnership with most of those
manufacturers, we get the CAD data in
and can then create our realtime model
and so on," Ammann says. "Working
directly with them is really helpful, with
sound recordings and test machines and
consulting on how their machines work.
Ultimately, we're not farmers here!"

Neither Xbox One vo: Р54 is
changing how Giants approaches the
task for the moment, with the consoles'
main benefit being that they allow the
studio to offer parity with a decent PC,
which means HD resolution and 60fps.
The simulation certainly isn't being
dumbed down for the new audience,
with the main difference being the control
scheme. This is, of course, a challenge
for Giants, though the bigger one by far
is being the pathfinder for its genre as a
whole — a genre that is always going to
tind it hard to go toe4o4oe with the many
betterfunded releases on the market.
"Those triple-A products have 50
times the budget and the marketing, but
in the end we don't have to compete.
We have our own dimension, like
Minecraft has," Ammann says, shrugging
off questions of whether an audience is
ready and waiting. “I think that is more
a problem for gaming journalists than
people out there — a lot don't understand
the game and so ask why people are
playing it. If you're interested in the
topic, you're interested in the game." B

Ёле Т

- "x
s aL

+
'
i
i
!
!

сакен асы б Coi dd
"uen |

Т 3 . 3

КҮЗІН.) e ve

cp. Nan
dia At aye iR e

Ж.

7
E

emo

The series’ patchwork
Afields-will soon be ready : :
T ae ia к mone
vo жей «for Xbox Oné and-PS54— — — —
e E £^ owners to tend Î a variety
of vehicles, drawn from: ;. ·
.over4ireal-world brands * |

Мын

стан,
P i-am. bs

KNOWLEDGE
JAPANESE HORROR

Fear factor

What's behind the flesh-creeping

he black incantation to spawn horror
games has evidently been recited
once again, with a horde of genre entries
shambling onto storefronts in recent
months. Alien: Isolation and Outlast
have explored new avenues in the west
recently, but the genre's defining masters
hail from Japan, and developers in the
region are just as alive to the trend.
"Japanese horror games, like
Japanese horror films, are not usually
simply about splatter and gore," says
Keisuke Kikuchi, producer of Zero:
Nuregarasu No Miko (Fatal Frame:
Oracle Of The Sodden Raven), made by
Koei Tecmo and released in Japan on
Wii U in September. “They place great
importance on the human relationships
in the background of the
story, and also on the
setting, such as the familiar
interior of a typical
Japanese home, where you
might expect something to
come out of the darkness.
They evoke fear not just
through things that are
scary but also through
things that are beautiful."
Fatal Frame is built around the
Camera Obscura, allowing the player
to exorcise spirits with a wellframed snap
— а mechanic intended to increase
immersion, and with it the number of
goose bumps. ІҒ5 heightened here by
using a GamePad to capture the spectres,
but the game also plays on the Japanese
association of water with the Other Side,
making the player character stronger but
also much more vulnerable when wet.
"We've tried to use water in this way
before, but the improved hardware and
HD graphics on Wii U allow us to
express it in a much scarier way," says
Kikuchi. "When the player anticipates

"Japanese games
evoke fear not just
through things that
are scary but also
through things that
are beautifu

revival of Japanese horror games?

there may be something lurking in the
water, it heightens the feeling of anxiety."
PT, meanwhile, has been out for
months, but Hideo Kojima’s first stab
at survival horror was a teaser for his
forthcoming reboot of Konami's Silent Hill,
and has much to say about the series'
new direction. The teaser places heavy
emphasis on building atmosphere, with
weapons — and indeed direct mechanics
of almost any kind — replaced by a
creeping sense of dread that is ramped
up by expert use of disjointed music
and haunting sound effects.

Even the way the game was
marketed, with no information released
other than the title, was an attempt by
Kojima to instil in the
player a suspicion of the
unknown. "Nowadays,
when people don't know
something, they Google
it," he said in a recent
interview with The Japan
Times. "We live in an age
of information. When that
suddenly disappears,
that's the scariest thing."
Just as Kojima is working on Silent
Hills with movie director Guillermo Del
Toro, whose CV includes The Devil's
Backbone and Pan's Labyrinth, Clock
Tower creator Hifumi Kouno and his
team at Nude Maker have teamed up
with Ju-on director Takashi Shimizu on the
recently announced Project Scissors. Their
collaboration is a pointand-click survival
horror game whose title invokes the
murder weapon brandished by the
psycho killers in the Clock Tower series.
"[Shimizu] has provided us with
invaluable insight as a film director while
we create graphic assets for the game,"
Kouno tells us. "He will continue to help

|”

Director Takashi
Shimizu (top) has
teamed up with Nude
Maker CEO Hifumi
Kouno to make
Project Scissors

us with his expertise in constructing the
presentation of each scene."

Kouno says that far from the film
director leading the project astray by
misunderstanding the unique charms of
videogame horror, Shimizu's involvement
has bolstered his own vision.

"We share mutual understanding and
opinion for what works and what does
not work in the horror genre," Kouno
says. "He has provided us with precise
and valuable opinions that will make the
game so much scarier!"

Coming to Vita and smartphones,
Project Scissors is set aboard a luxury
cruise ship on which the passengers and
crew fall victim to a host of gruesome
murders. Rather than a hero, the player
will assume the role of a passenger as a
way of creating a sense of powerlessness
within the closed confines of the ship.

Kouno tells us that he came up with
the concept for the game five years ago,
but that the dominance of triple-A titles
and the abundance of zombiethemed
action games made it hard to pitch the
more suspenseful idea he had in mind.
The rise of indie and mobile gaming has
brought his concept back from the dead.

As an isolated case, it makes sense,
but why this sudden horror influx of
Biblical proportions? After all, horror
genre movies are also going through a
renaissance in Japan, giving rise to films
such as Bilocation and The Complex.
Kikuchi partly ascribes the current taste
for horror to the cycles of fashion.

"In Japan, horror games and horror
movies always have their fans, and new
works are released every year," he says.
"But once every few years, there seems to
be a boom in horror titles. Also, as the
hardware evolves, it offers new means to
express horror - | think that explains the
timing of the current boom." Bl

The latest game in the Zero series, AKA Fatal Frame:
Oracle Of The Sodden Raven (above, below right) taps
into the traditional folklore surrounding water in its
homeland, but it's got its fair share of jump scares too

The Evil Within (left, above left) not only places a premium on weapons and ammo, but its
monsters don't fall easily. The sense of powerlessness gives rise to an atmosphere of terror.
PT (above) goes one further by giving the player no defensive options other than fleeing

AMO PI
TERROR

How the best of the
west is inspiring
Japanese games

Influence is a virtuous
loop. Japanese films were
freaking out western fans
long before the lank-
haired ghoul in 1998's
The Ring, and now The
Walking Dead is feeding
back into another long-
running Japanese series:
Resident Evil. Revelations
2 producer Michiteru
Okabe explained during
Tokyo Game Show that
the hit show was one of
the major influences on
the episodic structure of
Capcom's forthcoming
multiplatform game.

"Our series was originally
influenced by western
horror movies, and then
later a lot of western
games took influence from
Resi 4, so | think there is
a cycle of inspiration —
which is great," he says.

KNOWLEDGE
LUNA

ВІКО
WATCH

Inside Luna, a fable based
on children's literature

Luna tells the story of a young bird
that is convinced by the authoritative
owl you see here to swallow the last
remaining piece of the waning
moon. Described as a "tactile puzzle
game" — and inspired by origami,
sculpture and printmaking - its
gameplay will focus on transforming
the objects and characters in this
world, and even the world itself.

"Luna is an interactive fable about
coming to terms with mistakes,
processing change, and growing
into the person you choose to
become,” Robin Hunicke, CEO of
developer Funomena, tells us. "We're
inspired by children's literature,
including Goodnight Moon, The
Grouchy Ladybug and classic
Golden Books, but also illustrator
Mary Blair, Japanese woodcut artist
Umetaro Azechi, and sculptors such
as Lee Bontecou, Anish Kapoor and
Gabriel Orozco. There is a magical,
textural quality to the work of these
artists that we felt was important
for the themes of transformation
we're trying to explore.

"Glenn [Hernandez] began
doing concept work for the game
about a year ago. We spent a
long time painting, drawing апа
sharing notes as we collaborated
on the feel of the world, focusing on
building a world that was textured
like Glenn’s concepts, which were
often done in gouache, but that
still feels 3D and sculptural.”

Footage of ће дате debuted at
IndieCade this year and Funomena
is moving into full production now.
The image reproduced here was
generated in-engine, but there's still
a lot of work ahead. Hunicke says
it's too early to tell whether Luna will
arrive in 2015, but we're already
looking forward to seeing more of
this charming-looking concept. I

KNOWLEDGE
TALK/ARCADE

Soundbytes

Game commentary in snacksized mouthtuls

"We sincerely apologise
ог the delay. We are
committed to giving you
the best racing experience
on PS4 - it’s taking

a little longer

than we hoped.”

Shuhei Yoshida holds up his hands over DriveClub PS Plus Edition

"We thank the court

for protecting free
speech. This was an
absurd lawsvit from
the very beginning
and we're gratified that
in the end a notorious
criminal didn't win."

“It was game we believed
in, but we never felt that it
got to where it needed to
be — we never saw a
path to success if we
finished it. It wasn't up to
our quality standard and
we decided to cancel it."

Bethesda's Pete Hines
confirms what we all knew

already: Prey 2's dead

Rudy Giuliani on former
dictator Manuel Noriega's
failed Black Ops Il lawsuit

“It's the software that
matters. That's it. There's
nothing else that's
going fo convince you
to play other than
how good it is."

The Room developer Barry Meade on why design still matters
on mobile, and why developers don't have to be PR geniuses

20 EDGE

ARCADE
WATCH

Keeping an eye on the
coin-op gaming scene

Game Showdown
Manufacturer Sega

Codemasters’ Dirt series usually
involves denting cars, but it’s the
screen that’s been bent out of
shape for its arcade debut. The
focal point of Showdown's eye-
catching cabinet is a 100-inch
curved Hybrid Laser LED Projection
display, an alternative to the
in-vogue dome screen. The display
is complemented by 5.1 surround
sound, a force-feedback wheel
and seat, and a fully modelled
stainless-steel dashboard with
working dials, an engine start
button and a tunable radio.

The game offers four gameplay
modes from the console release:
standard racing in the form of
Race Off; Knock Out, in which you
must stay on a platform while
knocking others from it; Rampage,
here renamed Demolition, which
takes place in an open arena; and
the T-boning nightmare of 8-Ball,
which becomes Crossroads. There's
also a large selection of cars, 20 in
total, taken from an array of
classes that includes muscle,
pickup, saloon and ‘old-timer’.

Each seat is fitted with a
player face camera, the gurning
expressions from which are
displayed on Showdown TV - two
HD displays that sit above the
fourplayer setup. Showdown also
uses Sega’s Sega Scores online
portal for bragging rights. The
system displays a QR code on the
screen at the end of a session,
allowing you to scan it with your
smartphone. Following the link
will allow you to track your rating
for specific locations, regions and
even cabinets, plus your position
on the global leaderboard.

XBOX.COM/HALO

HAL

PHESMASTER CHIEF COLLECT tia

ЗУ
4%

4 BLOCKBUSTER GAMES ОМ 1 DISC

EXCLUSIVE ACCESS TO HALO 5: GUARDIANS MULTIPLAYER BETA

100+ MULTIPLAYER MAPS

INCLUDES HALO: NIGHTFALL DIGITAL SERIES

OUT 11.11.14

*Halo: Nightfall: 5 episode live-action series is streaming only, and will initially be available on a weekly basis, and then on demand. Xbox
One or Windows 8.1 and broadband internet required; ISP fees apply. Halo 5: Guardians Beta: Game disc required. Limited-time beta starts
December 27, 2014, and ends January 22, 2015. Must be 17+. Xbox One, broadband internet (ISP fees apply) and Xbox LIVE Gold membership
(sold separately) required. Halo: Nightfall and Halo 5: Guardians Beta dates, content, and features subject to change. See www.xbox.com/halo

www.pegi.info

KNOWLEDGE
FAVOURITES

S Calman is a Scottish comedian,
writer and actor who regularly guests
as a panellist on BBC Radio 4 shows
including The News Quiz and The
Unbelievable Truth. In 2007, she won a
BAFTA as part of the cast of Channel 4
sketch show Blowout, while last year saw
the debut of her first solo series, Susan
Calman ls Convicted, on Radio 4.
Throughout all of this, she's remained a
passionate advocate for videogames.

In 2011, you said on Radio 4's
Dilemma that when you're driving you
sometimes pretend to shoot people at
traffic lights as if you're in Grand Theft
Auto. Have you retained that habit?
[Laughs] Sometimes, yes! It's the argument
against videogames, | realise, that
videogames are terrible because they
increase violence. Well, no — it's just fun
sometimes. It's just tun, | think, to shoot
people at the traffic lights.

Do you remember your earliest gaming
experience, drive-by or otherwise?

We had an Atari console and | remember
my first experience was watching my
brother play Indiana Jones. We had a
BBC as well, so basically Chuckie Egg
and those kinds of games. Probably
because my big brother was playing
them, | thought games were really cool.
And then the first console | got was an
N64. After that, | decided to get a
PlayStation, because | had an American
tlatmate at the time who told me Resident
Evil was the best game ever. So we used
to rent Resident Evil trom Blockbuster, then
from the Friday until the Monday morning
we would play it, and then l'd give it

QUIZZICAL

Calman is currently on
her first ever UK tour,
titled Lady Like, which
runs until April 2015.
In between tour dates,
she's working on a
Radio 4 sitcom and a
forthcoming comedy
jam, and is reading a
script for a new
Channel 4 show. She'll
also be hosting a new
Radio 2 panel show in
which she's "hoping to
increase the gaming
quotient on Radio 2
with questions about
gaming - | try to do

it wherever І go. |
generally do it
because I think when
you find another
gaming nerd that you
can really talk to
about it, it's brilliant."

My Favourite Game
Susan Calman

The comedian and writer on imaginary drive-by shootings,
an obsession with Resident Evil, and gaming first dates

back and then rent it again. We should
have just bought it! And from then on l've
been a PlayStation girl, to be honest.

Is your wife interested in videogames?
Well, one of the reasons that it works is
that she is more of a gamer than | am.
I'm not in the house very much and
sometimes l'm not even out the door
before | hear the PlayStation going on.

| remember some of our first dates [when]
we were just sifting and playing games.

How about the people you work with?
Most News Quiz panellists don’t come
across as gaming-savvy.
That might be something
you could say, yes! |
mean, a lot of comics

of my generation play
games, and sometimes
I'll speak to [News Quiz
presenter] Sandi Toksvig
about it, but she has no
interest at all in gaming.
You know, | try to explain to her that

to me it's a bigger issue than gaming:

it's the art direction, it's the music, it's the
expression. And there's a huge amount of
controversy about women in gaming, but
younger people come to my shows and
stuff and | say | think it's a great thing for
women to get into — not just in gaming
terms, but in storylining, art direction,
music. It's a bigger industry than just
some guys in their pants shooting things.

So yov're something of an evangelist?
| try to say to people, "Have you seen

The Last Of Us? Have you seen some of
these other games?" It's much more than

^| say to people,
‘Have you seen
The Last Of Us? It’s
much more than
what you might
think gaming 157”

[shooting]. It's much more than what you
might think gaming is. So, | do try!

Have any of the games you’ve played
done a good job of representing
women, or alternative sexualities?
Well, the alternative sexuality thing is
another debate, which is an interesting
one. It's a diversity issue, rather than just
a sexuality or gender one, and my view
has always been that games are rubbish
at it. But then so is television and film, you
know? If you watch Ripper Street, which
is an interesting show, women are
slapped every five seconds for some
unknown reason, but

| don't turn my back on film
or TV. | think the problem

is that if you try to look at
alternative sexualities to

a be a representation of
LGBT people in games,

it's just not happening yet.

| mean, there's no question
that the game industry is
really far behind anywhere else in that
regard, but at the same time to me it's
not about having a lesbian hero, it's just
about having a woman who has genuine
and understandable complex feelings.

What's your favourite game?

Now, | love all the games | know people
are going to shout that | should love, but
in terms of the excitement that | felt when
| first played it, it would probably be
Arkham Asylum. Now, there’s lots of
others, believe me, but genuinely, while
it has faults and it's repetitive and the
combat system is problematic and
everything else, | loved it. B

Calman's current work
includes writing a sitcom
for Radio 4 featuring a
female character who's
into videogames

KNOWLEDGE
THIS MONTH

WEBSITE

Vin Hill art

WEB GAME

The Uncle Who Worked

http://bit.ly/acvrisingsun ۴ uu 4 For Nintendo
Aspiring concept artist Vin Hill А http://bit.ly/theuncle
is looking to make a name for | 2 The latest unnerving horror

himself in the industry with an
Assassin's Creed-themed
personal project. In it, Hill
imagines a new game set
during the Meiji restoration
in Japan circa 1868. His pre-
production work includes
contemporary samurai outfits
— which, of course, integrate
the series’ iconic hood —
detailed weapon designs, and
some rather fetching sunset
scenes of Kyoto. Hill has even
conceived the player's path
through the game, setting a
route from Kyoto to Osaka
before eventually reaching
Tokyo, with the modernisation
of Japan increasingly evident
in each new city. The idea of
playing a samurai assassin is
certainly appealing, but with
Assassin's Creed Chronicles:
China on the way, Ubisoft
probably won't be looking

to Japan just yet.

VIDEO

The Genesis Power Team
http://bit.ly/genesispower
Music video director Tyler
Esposito recently unearthed an
old VHS tape that he and his
father made in 1991. A promo
video created in the style of
contemporary videogame TV
shows, The Genesis Power
Team sees a rather shy
Esposito and his effusive father
attempting to promote the
virtues of going 16bit to New
York relatives still clinging to
their NES. The pair rattle
through a long list of games
including Esposito's favourite,
Castle Of Illusion, offering
plenty of nostalgic appeal. But
it's Esposito's relationship with
his father — and their shared
love of games - that gives

the video another dimension.

fiction from My Father's Long,
Long Legs developer Michael
Lutz is a collaboration with
illustrator Kim Parker that
explores nostalgia-tinged
memories of a friend with
connections. In this case, a
pal's uncle who works for
Nintendo and has access to all
manner of exciting treasures,
from limited editions of games
to prototype consoles. But
there's something darker
lurking behind the tale's
facade, which you unravel
during a sleepover at your
friend's house. It’s a short
game, but there are six
endings to find, and while
essentially a text adventure,
Parker's illustrations bring
Uncle's universe into focus
while some particularly chilling
audio work will keep the game
embedded in your mind for
some time after its completion.

| еі кі мыгы, Here 1з бе brig теге ГҮ.

ЕТІ.
іштің із Un dame wei ling кетігі;

С Тағ ма там бт лені ы аны.

Ag кан im nhà ar I тоа іне БЫ
gle ін тиер Үн. PET

А ise rmm ршы ian чет jim y Uu (шаа

CELIA

THIS MONTH ON EDGE

When we weren't doing everything else, we were thinking about stuff like this

BOOK

Sega Mega Drive/Genesis: Collected Works
http://readonlymemory.vg

The result of a hugely successful Kickstarter campaign from the

end of last year, Collected Works brings together a written history

of Sega's console, authored by Guardian games editor Keith Stuart,
with a remarkable compendium of game design documents, concept
sketches, previously unseen hardware plans and vivid game and box
artwork. Stuart's text is suffused with industry interviews featuring
the likes of Sega founder David Rosen and president Hayao
Nakayama. Even more names feature in a collection of 28 interviews
with original Sega developers at the back of the book, which
includes insight from key players such as Yu Suzuki, Naoto Ohshima
and Yuji Naka. It's an attractive distraction for anyone with a
passing interest in games, but for Mega Drive fans this is essential.

TWEETS

There's no such thing as a casual gamer
really, just lazy game designers.

Zach Gage @helvetica

Game designer

Irons fist QTEs
Kevin Spacey, Hugh Ме still aren't done with
Laurie - more pro actors them? Look, Dragon’s Lair

in videogames, please was released іп 1983 Homophobes boycotting Apple because of
Tim Cook's brave announcement are going
to lose it when they hear about Turing.
Joe Gravett @joegravett

Independent business change consultant

A Dead end

The Walking Dead's long-
running save-data issues
infect some PS4 users

Red potion
Nintendo president
Satoru Iwata is on the

Writing and testing Al code is a good way
mend alter surgery

to reassure yourself that the Rise of the

Robots is a looooooong way off.

Bailing out Jake Solomon @SolomonJake
Game designer, Firaxis

The Tony Hawk game

we played five years

ago was Shred

Birdman returns
We haven't played
a new Tony Hawk
game in five years

Arguing with a troll online is like trying
to teach a goat to drive. No one's happy
& your car is ruined & it's still a goat.
Kumail Nanjiani @kumailn

Dangerous times Comedian

Elite: Dangerous has
an official release date

Expensive times
That means we need
new flight sticks, surely

ІЗ ONLINE FPS

чш

“Ace sores En

4 А
D 2014 Crytek GmbH. All Rights Reserved. Crytek, CrgENGIME, Warioce тай their respective bagas are trademarks ar registered trad af the Crytek graup al companies in the EU. the USA & other territories. «cQ» CRYZNGIN = |

E -EXCIUSIVE- |
INSIDE PSAS
FIRST GREAT
ADVENTURE

Issue 273

Dialogue
Send your views, using
‘Dialogue’ as the subject

line, to edge@futurenet.com.

Our letter of the month
wins a SteelSeries Wireless
H Headset, or an Apex
keyboard plus Sensei
Wireless Laser mouse

steelseries

Drowned in sound
It occurs to me that sound is an often-
ignored part of games, both in terms of its
design and how it effects our experiences.
As a budding sound designer, I’ve become
attuned to the state of our community’s
general attitude to game sound, and it’s
pretty shocking. Few reviews comment on
sound, and while system specifications for
PC games fetishistically list all the parts
necessary for superb visual display, they
never recommend a soundcard or advise
you to use a 5.1 Surround Sound system.
This really hit home when I started
playing Alien: Isolation. The game sounds
absolutely amazing, from the off-key violin
shrieks behind you as you step
through doors, daring you to
look behind, to the death
throes of Sevastopol Station
(almost indistinguishable from
human screams) and Ripley’s
voice spoken intimately
close to the mic.

to be played in surround
sound. This is the way it’s
been mixed and edited, with
full multidimensionality. The game’s sounds
are produced to a cinematic calibre and they
require a home cinematic system to be
experienced properly. So why is this fact
omitted from the system specification on
Steam? Why doesn’t it appear on the game’s
outer packaging? How many people are
missing out? What does this say about the
industry’s attitude to its sound designers?
As gamers, we appear to regularly
forget that sound plays just as important
а role as vision in creating the environments
we enjoy. System Shock 2 works because
you can hear the moans of the mutants in
the corridors, but you don’t know where
they are, and ditto for Minecraft’s zombies
and Creepers. The sound of footsteps
creeping up behind you in PT is scary as all
hell, and you can’t help but turn around
when doors creak and slam shut. Even

“Alien: Isolation
is designed to
be played in
surround sound,
Alien: Isolation is designed 50 Why isn’t it
on the box?”

non-horror games such as Sword & Sworcery,
Rome II and Skyrim all use audio to both
unify and enrich the gameworld and our
experience of it.

With games like Alien: Isolation and PT,
we're just starting to see the results of a
modern approach to game sound design.
Games are telling us that they can be the
forerunners of sound design, pioneers in
the drive towards 3D and VR immersion.
It’s about time we started listening.
Ashleigh Allan

Playing games through a surround sound
setup is ideal but, like the graphics cards
you mention, it’s tech that not everyone can
afford. A good alternative is a
fine pair of headphones, of
course, which just happens to
be one of the options available
from the SteelSeries kit you’ve
landed yourself. In the future,
we'll try to be a bit more
mindful of audio content
during the review process.

Online/offline

When are developers going
to learn about online launches? I am, of
course, referring to DriveClub, which
through a staggering combination of
mismanagement and weak server
infrastructure managed to arrive through
the post with basically every feature Га
bought the game for missing in action.
Patching it ‘later’ is unacceptable when your
whole marketing revolves around driving
with friends, and while the singleplayer
mode gives an enticing hint at what might
have been — and apparently what reviewers
reviewed — it simply isn’t good enough.

It’s not the first time we’ve been burned
by big promises and terrible launches. Sim
City springs to mind, but so does Grand
Theft Auto V and the Evolve alpha, for which
I wasted over 12GB of bandwidth only to fail
to connect to a single game. Yes, it’s ‘only’
an alpha, but it shows exactly how

underprepared game server estimates are

by default. Here's an idea: if you're going to
make your game online-only, how about you
build your infrastructure to cope with all
the players who have paid to play your

game on day one?

In fact, anything else is surely gross
misrepresentation. I would return an MP3
player that couldn't play music until a week
or a month after I took it out of the box, and
I would expect a full refund. Publishers and
platform holders likewise need to start
being held accountable and losing revenue
if they are ever to learn that you cannot lie
to consumers. As it stands, they err on
the side of buying the cheapest possible
infrastructure and then watching as the
servers topple over, shrugging and going
back to totting up the shareholder reports.
Phil Tully

MP3 manufacturers don't tend to offer
early-access releases, though. And if
DriveClub were an MP3 player it would play
music from day one — just not with other
people. Still, it's definitely frustrating when
a game launches with missing features —
especially when they were available to
reviewers. Of course, while it's not always
true for downloads, in the case of retail
releases you can return games for full
refunds if you're not happy with them.

Pretty vacant

I am not, it has to be said, the most devoted
Call Of Duty follower, but nor amIa
detractor. But I am growing increasingly
tired of the series' lack of any discernible
artistry. I have no problem at all with Call
Of Duty's bombast, blinkered linearity or
repeating formula — these are all facets
shared by Battlefield, which I also enjoy.

But DICE's artists understand that explosive
gameplay can be counterpointed by visual
subtlety, whereas the people making
Advanced Warfare seem to take a spray-
and-pray artistic approach that's echoes
the game's loadout.

There are plenty of ostensibly next-gen
graphical effects going on (usually all at
once), but they feel slapped on over some
pretty ugly geometry. The textures are
samey and uninspiring, and everything
feels incredibly busy, making it difficult
to discern what's going on. It's already tough
enough distinguishing your teammates
from the enemy — unless they're stood
right to you, everyone's a black smudge
until you put your crosshair over them and
reveal the blue outline that denotes allies
(an appropriate colour, given the number
of blue-on-blue atrocities l've committed
as a result of this).

I know it's a completely different style
of game, but after playing Alien: Isolation
my expectations for detailed science-fiction
environments have been raised a great deal.
A next-gen firstperson shooter should be
dazzling to look at, but while Advanced
Warfare occasionally looks impressive, it
feels just as hampered by its last-gen
versions as Ghosts did, only it's wearing a
thicker layer of smeared-on next-gen
makeup this time around. I'll admit that
Advanced Warfare's character models look
incredible in the cutscenes, but I can't
help but feel that if they'd really tried, the
whole game could have looked like that.
Battlefield 4 had Xbox 360 and PlayStation
3 versions, too, but it looked fantastic on
my PlayStation 4 — it felt made for it, in
fact, and only then downscaled for the
older consoles, rather than warmed up
after the fact.

Richard Crooke

Advanced Warfare's real achievements lie

in how much is happening onscreen at any
one time, and the pace everything clips
along at, but Activision would surely

admit that having to create 360 and PS3
versions hindered the overall creative vision
rather than helped it. At least COD's main
focus is its multiplayer, which needs to be
fast and stable — two things Battlefield 4
struggled with at launch.

DISPATCHES
DIALOGUE

www.facebook.com/
edgeonline
Discuss gaming topics with
fellow Edge readers

New horizons
There's something about visiting a new
game world that's really exciting, but all too
often these places are just a backdrop to
whatever's happening in the story rather
than places in their own right. I’m the kind
of person who likes to explore in the brief
quiet after a gunfight, or deliberately
venture as far down the corridor to the left
as possible before submitting to the game
designer's obvious desire for me to take the
one on the right. Which is why I was so
pleased to see a game all about exploration
over anything else on the cover of E273.

From what you say, Rime sounds like it's
been designed especially for me, and the
obvious Ico and Shadow Of The Colossus
references just make me even more excited
about the prospect of striking out into its
world. But I was also very excited to read
about Assassin's Creed Unity in your preview.
I've enjoyed navigating that series’ worlds
over the years, but I kind of get bored of the
games themselves quite quickly. It sounds
like Ubisoft is making exploration much
more a part of gameplay, and I, for one,
hope they pull that off.

And while I'm not particularly a fan
of spaceships, I guess Elite: Dangerous
represents that sense of adventure even
more (even if No Man's Sky is more
immediately appealing to me). But whether
it's clambering up buildings, running around
on an island or zipping about in uncharted
space, it was certainly refreshing to see so
many developers taking their worlds as
seriously as the games they set within
them. I really hope this trend continues.
Alex Ritchie

You’re right: it does appear to be a trend,
and one that we're happy to celebrate
with an Edge cover or two. In terms of it
continuing, consider Jonathan Blow's
The Witness and The Chinese Room's
Everybody's Gone To The Rapture. We
dare say The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt will
offer up some decent views, too. Ё

Illustration marshdavies.com

ere I am, golfing in the desert. Why am
H: golfing in the desert? It doesn't

matter. This, apparently, is where I like
to golf. In a place that is literally nothing but
a giant sand trap. The brownish-orange of
the dunes, sculpted by some sadist into
improbably angular forts and peaks; the
Beijing-smog orange-grey of the sky; the pert
little flag next to the hole where somehow
I must direct the ball. I say “Г, but I am
nowhere to be this bleak
environment. It's just the ball, the hole, and
the flag. And untold miles of sand.

When by some miracle the ball goes into
the hole, the desertscape scrolls laterally
a single screen, and the ball is pushed up
from the old hole by some mechanism that
makes a grating, rumbling sound. It is like
some kind of satirical psychological-test
machinery left around on an island like the
one in Lost. A desert island, of course.

Surely you are taking this desert too
seriously, the sensible Edge reader objects.
And perhaps I am. Desert Golfing is, after all,
just a cunning little Angry Birds-alike
in which you fire the ball not by swinging
anything resembling a club, but by swiping
your finger anywhere on the screen to trigger
a familiar bow-and-arrow direction-and-
strength mechanic. The fact that the ball
bounces around on sand is important for the
teasing physics of the game (the sand's
friction and drag makes those moments
when the ball is crawling towards the hole
and finally drops in all the more delicious),
but the environment is drawn so simply
that it might sound silly to harp on too
much about it. And yet, frankly, I find this
desert fascinating, horrifying, funny, and
oppressive. This is a desert of the mind. It is
not a real desert. It is the desert of the real.

We knew already, of course, that the
simplest representations can be the most
evocative. Desert Golfing reminds me in this
way of the far more sophisticated arthouse
tourism of Proteus, with its square white
pixel blossoms and chunky trees, and the

seen in

DISPATCHES
PERSPECTIVE

STEVEN POOLE

Trigger Happy

Shoot first, ask questions later

Frankly, | find this desert
fascinating, horrifying,
funny, and oppressive.

This is a desert of the mind

way it seems to be themed partly around
a nostalgia for magenta as one of only a few
possible computer-display colours. Proteus
would not work in the same way — as a
digital themepark of abstracted, idealised
nature — if its animals had detailed faces,
or if you could identify plant species,
because it derives its aesthetic power from
impressionistic generality.

Yet Proteus, when it first came out, was
one of those games that periodically generate
passionate arguments about whether they are
games at all. (Clue: it ran on a computer
system, it wasn’t a media player or authoring

tool or ‘productivity’ software, and it didn’t
do anything unless you also did things.
Therefore, it was a game.) It’s obvious, on
the other hand, that Desert Golfing is a game,
because golf is a game, and this
simulation of it. Or at least, given the 2D,
side-on viewpoint, a simulation of some
type of game that is halfway between golf
and, say, basketball. (Sometimes you feel
as though you are trying to throw the ball
into the hole.)

But Desert Golfing is also a profoundly
severe game, in that there is no practice
possible, and no resetting of holes allowed.
Instead, you just play one hole after another
and your stroke count goes inexorably
upwards. In this sense, Desert Golfing is
existentially terrifying and theologically
unforgiving: sins (bogeys) can never be
expiated or erased from the record. They just
accumulate relentlessly throughout the game,
like mistakes throughout a life.

It must be the cruel abstraction of Desert
Golfing, then, that reminds me of another,
very different but also highly evocative game,
based around a panoptical mechanic of
achieving altitude and therefore visual
command of the environment. It was Geoff
Crammond's 1986 masterpiece The Sentinel,
a moody, minimalist strategy game that gave
a convincing impression of a solid 3D world
even on 8bit computers.

The official sequel, 1998's The Sentinel
Returns, featured a properly polygonal world
with colourful lighting, more detailed
objects, and elaborate skyboxes. And because
of this, it had less of the atmosphere that had
always haunted me in the original — the
feeling that The Sentinel’s monochrome
polygonal landscapes were themselves a kind
of perilous desert. Much less elaborate than
The Sentinel, Desert Golfing is, too, only a
game — but, as with all seriously crafted
miniaturism, its aesthetic choices
resonate far beyond the bezels of your phone.

is a

may

Steven Poole’s Trigger Happy 2.0 is now available from
Amazon. Visit him online at www.stevenpoole.net

naTunrca.maoTion

“а

WE HIRE EXCEPTIONAL PEOPLE
SO WE CAN MAKE AMAZING THINGS

LONDON * OXFORD • Bossflis

len
NATURALMOTIONCAREERS.COM

c
О
=
©
ы.
Б
іл
=

ust as I was about to tear open the plastic

wrapper of Need For Speed: Rivals, my son

warned: “Theres no multiplayer" It
was a startling discovery, especially since
I bought the game expressly to play it with
him. After all, isn't a videogame two people
challenging one another to a duel?

That's what it meant for decades, anyway.
In 1958, Willy Higinbotham made a
makeshift tennis game that ran on the
oscilloscope in his research lab. In 1962, MIT
researchers made Spacewar, a twoplayer space
combat game. Nolan Bushnell made an
unsuccessful coin-op adaptation of it in 1971.
The next year, he and Al Alcorn designed
Pong, which allowed two players to compete
with one another at an abstraction of table
tennis. Four years earlier, Ralph Baer had
made a similar game prototype for TVs.
Atari's 1977 Video Computer System (AKA
2600) and Mattel’s 1979 Intellivision
continued the tradition for a time. Even at
home, games were mostly trials waged
between humans, mediated by a computer.

It wasn’t the microcomputer but the
minicomputer — the DEC PDP in particular
— that had birthed games like Spacewar, and
while it was a social computer, used in
research labs, it was also a solitary one.

That’s where the adventure game arises.
In the early 1970s, William Crowther made a
simulated caving game he could play on the
PDP-10 minicomputer at his employer, a
defence contractor. He thought the game,
Colossal Cave, would give him something to
do with his daughters when they visited.
Crowther had recently been divorced, and
ironically the solitude of separation served
up the time necessary to write the game
in the first place.

It was played by typing commands into a
computer, which would parse and interpret
them as movements and actions. It was an
idea Crowther borrowed from MIT researcher
Joseph Weizenbaum’s 1966 ELIZA program, a
virtual Rogerian psychotherapist. Much to
Weizenbaum’s chagrin, sometimes it didn’t

DISPATCHES
PERSPECTIVE

IAN BOGOST

Difficulty Switch

Hard game criticism

Games supporting multiplayer
modes like this are curiosities.
They are indulgences,
often infantilised ones

matter that ELIZA’s ‘patients’ knew it was a
program and not a human interlocutor.

Eventually, we could play both single- and
multiplayer games on consoles, arcade
cabinets, and on PCs, but the personal
leaned towards the
solitary experience of the player versus a
computational foe or environment, while the
console retained the social experience of
twoplayer challenge first conceived in the
research labs of the 1960s and the arcades of
the 1970s and 1980s.

The social contexts for these apparatuses
largely set the stage for how they were used

computer always

for games. The microcomputer was a solitary
device, a work appliance meant to make tasks
more efficient. It was (and still is) a single
terminal best used by an individual. The
coin-op cabinet could be played alone, but
was large enough to be shared — and it was
situated in the raucous social setting of the
tavern or arcade. And the home console was
stationed in the living room or den, the great
new electronic hearth of 20th century living.

Today, a different shift has taken place.
The arcade has long since atrophied, but both
the PC and the console are now implicated in
a different, larger social space: the Internet.
Being online is now something we can do
all the time, everywhere. In fact, being
online is the norm, bar the actual failure of
communication infrastructure. When you
can go online, what point is there in
differentiating the desk from the den?

Today, games that support play in the
sense I wanted with Need For Speed are
curiosities. They are indulgences, often
infantilised ones. Mario Kart and Super Smash
Bros offer childish exceptions that kids and
adults alike feel no need to apologise for, but
otherwise the splitscreen, twoplayer shooter
or driving game or fighting game has been
largely excised in favour of online play.
Colocation is unnecessary, inconvenient.

The videogame is not alone in having
abandoned the electronic hearth. The
television is also in decline, replaced by
streaming digital video to phones and tablets
and computer monitors. Increasingly, TV is
also something we watch alone, or at least
not colocated with our fellow viewers.
Competitive, twoplayer head-to-head games
forced us to share that device, to make room
for one another within it — literally in most
cases, both via split screens and via our
bodies’ positions on chairs and couches. The
end of splitscreen is nigh, and with it, half a
century of games as contests between two
parties who can look one another in the eye.

Ian Bogost is an author and game designer. His award-
winning А Slow Year is available at www.bit.ly/1eQalad

THE WORLD'S LARGEST COMMUNITY
OF NEXT-GEN GAMERS

ary

сее

\
е N WI

@ Qi
NI N |

SN
ў

WHERE THE

- PLAYERS?"

PlayStation® Store via your uk.playstation.com/playstationplus Your local retailer
PlayStation® console or PC

AlayStation*Plus content and services vary by subscriber age. PiayStatlorPius subscription only available to Sony Entertaiment Network account holders with aces to Рау Зак ине and high-speed internet. Sony Entertainment Network, PlayStation® Store and PlayStation® Pius subject tn terns of use and

not available in all countries and languages; PlayStation*Plus content and sew ices wary by subscriber age; PlayStation® Piss subsciiptioa auibaaScally renews at fe end of fhe subscription period and youwill be charged in accordance with the SEN Terms of Serie. Users must be 7 years or olderand users under

18 require parental ansent- eu.playstation.comvlegal Service availability і not guaranteed Online features af specific games may be withccawn on reasonable notice - eu playstation comy gamesewers " Ji." and "Play Station” are registered trademarks of Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. Als, "Sra" Ба
trademarbof the same company. AB other trademarks ave fe property of their respective owners.

Illustration marshdavies.com

DISPATCHES
PERSPECTIVE

аќ

NATHAN BROWN

Big Picture Mode

Industry issues given the widescreen treatment

hile I used to play a lot of Street

Fighter, I don't any more, because

it has recently become crushingly
apparent that the pitter-patter of tiny feet is
quite incompatible with the clickety-clack of
an arcade stick. But for a number of years,
Street Fighter IV was just about all I played,
and it was certainly all I played online.
Endless Battle mode was a Friday evening
fixture, а weekly, wine-soaked, winner-
stays-on session with seven friends. But
Ranked matches were different: single
face-offs against anonymous foes, all of them
playing to win and prepared to resort to all
manner of nefarious tactics to do so. It was
horrible, in an irresistible sort of way.

One particular match against an
unpleasant Ken sticks in the memory. Ken
had a bad rep in those days, seen as the
choice of the brainless, winning by mashing
dragon punch inputs all match long. I play
Ken too, and have long seen it as a sort of
duty to repair his reputation. I try to play
him with style and respect. Against another
Ken, though? One like this? Forget all that. I
can mash with the best of them.

I lost, horribly, and the ragemail arrived,
my opponent taking loudly homophobic
offence at my having dressed Ken in a
shocking pink cowboy outfit. I got my own
back by inviting them to an Endless lobby,
waiting until they joined, then leaving the
room for ten minutes to pop the kettle on.
When I returned, they were gone, and there
was another message waiting. “Come on
Freddie Mercury start the match u fukin
dickhead.” Stuff like that. Another invite,
another exit, another message. Forty minutes
later, he was telling me to stop harassing him
or he'd report me to Microsoft. I won,
horribly, and while it made me feel better
about the loss and the abuse that followed,
I couldn't help but question how I was
choosing to spend my free time. Га just
spent 40 minutes in the kitchen drinking a
frankly unnecessary amount of tea and
cackling at a man on the Internet.

Perhaps if games stop

putting players in a situation
that will make them angry,
everyone will get along fine

It was enough to put me off online
gaming, for the most part, for a few years. If T
did play online, it was either with friends or
with no headset, my account preferences
tweaked so that randoms couldn't send me
messages. Whenever a developer claims their
in-progress game is going to revolutionise
co-op, seamlessly matchmaking groups of
random players who will have the time of
their lives, I am immediately sceptical.
People, after all, are awful.

And then there was Destiny. I rolled my
eyes when a Bungie dev at a preview event
described how I'd be struggling against a

tough foe and would be saved by other
players coming over the hill with rocket
launchers. I thought it more likely they'd
hang back, wait for me to die, then stroll in
to mop up and take the spoils for themselves.
Imagine my surprise, then, that this has the
friendliest online playerbase a big console
game has had in years.

In Destiny, I chat cordially with players
I've never met. I am revived in boss fights by
players many levels higher than me whose
time I am clearly wasting. A few nights ago,
out patrolling the Moon, I saw another player
running along a high ledge towards a loot
chest. Destiny's chests spawn randomly, and
disappear a few seconds after first opened,
though they dish out loot to all-comers in
that period. This unknown Guardian saw me,
waved, pointed back down the way to show
how he got up onto the ledge, then waited for
me to join him before he opened the chest.
I was stunned. Even PvP seems to be fine,
perhaps because you can't really complain
about anything in such a deliciously broken
multiplayer mode. Ragemail, headset abuse,
griefing: all have become accepted standards
in online games, and particularly in online
shooters. In Destiny, the first major online
game of the generation, there's none of it.

Ever since Halo 2's online community
turned racist, sexist, homophobic headset
invective into a massmarket pursuit, we
have collectively, and understandably, blamed
the players. But it only takes one person to
lower the tone, and mob mentality is such
that it will become progressively lower as the
virus spreads. It’s how a difference of
opinion leads to death threats, and a stolen
kill to a volley of racism. Perhaps, as Destiny
suggests, it's simply a question of design, and
if games stop putting players in a situation
that will make them angry, everyone will get
along fine. By that logic, I should never
play Street Fighter again, and we should all
probably quit Twitter for good.

Nathan Brown is Edge’s deputy editor, and he has some
pretty choice jokes about your mother to share later

3 ( a iid
ж Play Station

| EXCLUSIVE |

' % ўсве Е.
"^ "With all new 4 "x

" ow
8 „А

THE

ГСНЕК

WIL HUNT

FEBRUARY 24'^, 2015

фхескоке

іні

LAH OTA Е BSA

f чптснек.
السا‎

BUY.I HEWITCHER.COM

f / THEWITCHER - / WITCHERGAME > / WITCHERGAME

= P

a ق‎
is based on a novel by Andrzej Sapkowski. All other copyrights and trademarks are the property of their respective owners. ZS | РС” та. —
PROVISIONAL с XBOXONE gg DVD-ROM „>

m cadi Ay

\
f,

\
;

JOYSTICK
AWARDS
Most Wanted

CD PROJEKT RED’

AWARDS
® GOLDEN

WINNER OF
OVER 160

.
ы تاا هه‎ лыс ақылары
Ё ТЕ
f
کے سو‎ ds — | =н
—— س‎ — Se
ELFIS ^ ur ole # -
P FX z ar F

M
V

ыы 1. жн ‘ i
че: p يا‎ е 5 r а i ^

THE GAMES IN OUR SIGHTS THIS MONTH

Battlefield Hardline
360, PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox One

Battleborn
PC, PS4, Xbox One

Tearaway Unfolded
PS4

Puyo Puyo Tetris
PS4, Xbox One

There Came An Echo
PC, Xbox One

Axiom Verge
PC, PS4, Vita

Captain Toad:
Treasure Tracker
Wii U

Evolve
PC, PS4, Xbox One

Return Of The
Obra Dinn
PC

Where The Water
Tastes Like Wine
PC

Explore the iPad
edition of Edge for
extra Hype content

The bad touch

Mud sticks, but it's a special kind of sticky in videogames. When a beloved
band releases a bad album, or a revered director puts out a stinker, it's their
personal stock that falls, and theirs alone. Few pin the blame on the record
label or film studio that allowed it to happen. We see music and films as
being made by individuals — or small groups of them. When a game goes
bad, the entire studio tends to carry the can.

This issue, we look at two games whose very announcements were
greeted with suspicion. Battlefield Hardline (p38) is being developed by
Visceral, which has never made a game in this series before, but still finds
itself saddled with its legacy. After all, a series of botched online launches
was a large contributing factor in publisher EA being voted the Worst
Company In America two years in a row. Given Visceral’s history as the
studio behind Dead Space, and Battlefields neverending multiplayer
problems, it's understandable that the studio is trying to focus attention on
Hardline's singleplayer component. Until the game has launched, however,

MOST
WANTED

Game Of Thrones Fire TV, PC,
others TBC

Winter is coming, and so too is Telltale's
take on George RR Martin's novels, with
the first episode confirmed for release
before the year is out. Details remain
scant, but here's hoping player choice
will be more important than in the
disappointingly linear Wolf Among Us.

Galax-Z PC, PS4, Vita

17-Bit's 2D space shooter has resurfaced.
Still drawing on a Saturday-morning
anime style, it’s now one part physics toy,
one part Roguelike. But it’s the advanced
Al that intrigues. With dogged pilots who
employ smart tactics, it promises to be

a very special kind of bullet hell.

Crackdown Xbox One

Sunset Overdrive's bounding open-world
chaos has whetted our appetite for a new
Crackdown which, if it even comes close
to the multiplayer promise of the reveal
trailer shown at E3 in June, will be an
explosive addition to Xbox One’s lineup.

suspicion will prevail, whatever the developers do or say in the meantime.

Yet for all the anti-EA sentiment, at least the Battlefield
games that land on retail shelves look the same as they
did in previews. Gearbox Software, maker of Battleborn
(642), is still trying to live down the furore over Aliens:
Colonial Marines, which looked excellent at trade shows
and preview events and like a completely different,
dramatically worse game in its final form. Gearbox is
making all the right noises about its blend of MOBA, FPS
and fighting game mechanics, but it has to sell more than
a new idea to players, it has to sell itself all over again,
proving that it has more to offer than Borderlands or
empty promises. A band can make another album, and
a director another film. Yet one bad game too many can
kill an entire studio, spelling unemployment for hundreds.
In games, there's a lot more than reputation at stake.

BATTLEFIELD

HARDLINE

Is Visceral's military shooter in a new
uniform cut out for police work?

Publisher |

Developer
Format
Origin

Release |

Visceral Games

360, PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox One
US

March 17 (NA), 20 (EU)

here was never much hope that Hardline

— the first Battlefield to star a member

of US law enforcement — would be a
vehicle for serious social commentary, as
timely as such comment might be in the wake
of the violent clashes between enforcers and
protesters in Ferguson, Missouri, which have
underlined the extent of the US state police’s
dependence on military-grade hardware.
Hardline is certainly alive to the appeal of the
latter, but this also means it risks provoking
a scandal by courting a real-world parallel too
energetically. Even disregarding the fallout
from the previous two Battlefield launches,
this is surely not an enticing prospect for EA,
a publisher still living down its twice-awarded
Worst Company In America tag, and facing
nomination for the award again this year.

Thus, Hardline appears to be a game about

police work in much the same way that Call
Of Duty: Black Ops II was a game about drone
warfare: it’s content to scrape the surface of
troublesome issues for atmospheric purposes,
taking its cues from road-tested explorations
of those issues in television and films such
as Michael Mann's Heat. Executive producer
and Visceral GM Steve Papoutsis’s thoughts
are predictably deflating. “We by no means
wanted to create a political statement with
our game,” he tells us. “We’re making an
entertainment experience, just like you see on

TV and film. Recently, there have been some
events that are very sad and not cool, but our
game isn’t the platform to take that on. We
never intended any political undertones.”

And yet the portrayal of Miami’s suburbs
is arrestingly charged. An early mission begins
with a drive through a rough neighbourhood
in search of an underworld boss that sees
player character Nick Mendoza riding shotgun
while his partner, Khai, doles out exposition
and banter. It’s a familiar introductory device,
but worth it for the social backdrop. At an
intersection, a well-built young man lingers in
front of the bonnet to shoot the detectives an
ominous look. Later, a bedraggled old-timer
staggers up to the windshield toting a rag
and spray; when waved away, he screams an
imprecation at the vehicle as it crosses a train
track. Long before the shooting begins, there’s
a sense of being under siege, protected yet
exposed by the cop car and what it represents.

The audio design, meanwhile, puts in a
fine impersonation of the crowded soundtrack
of an American metropolis. Sirens, the hum
of distant planes, music and laughter seep
into one another as Mendoza and Khai

tiptoe through grubby tenement courtyards,
throwing bullet casings to distract watchful
gangsters. There’s doubtless an intriguing
story to be told against such an elaborately b

Steve Papoutsis,
general manager
of Visceral Games

ABOVE Calling shotgun takes
on a more literal meaning
when you can keep shooting
from the passenger's seat,
or pop out the window to
continue your drive-by.

LEFT The series' focus on
teamwork is intact, the
multiplayer modes doling
out points for successful
break-ins, loot collection,
and disarms as well as

kills and squad wipes

For all that there's powerful
realism in the campaign's
opening moments, it's soon
discarded for bank heists
torn from the GTA playbook
and, rather less plausibly,
The Dukes Of Hazzard

BATTLEFIELD
HARDLNE

researched and rendered backdrop, but
Mendoza's doesn't feel like that yarn — so
far, at least. A hot-tempered rising star from
the streets with daddy issues, he seems too
obviously the result of a fondness for pulp
fiction to inspire much empathy.

In any case, the campaign soon escalates
beyond street-level naturalism, becoming a
taut action extravaganza with zipline getaways
that call to mind the bank robbery from The
Dark Knight. These sections merge tools from
the numbered Battlefield games with open-
ended setpieces that are clearly influenced by
Far Cry 3's outpost assaults. It's here that the
campaign is strongest, and it all starts with a
gadget. While shadowing a wired-up goon,
the aptly nicknamed Tap, Mendoza is handed
a police scanner that can be used to radar-tag
hoodlums and objects of note, such as crates
of weapons or alarms. Equipped with a scoped
mic, it also offers a means of eavesdropping
on suspects and scouring crime scenes for
evidence, a mechanic that feeds into an
overarching subplot in which you assemble
a case against underworld kingpins.

From this point, many encounters settle
into a familiar pattern. You'll mark up all the
enemies in the area, sniff around for flanking
routes, vantage points and entrances, then
pick your guns and go on the offensive. The
addition of a grappling hook and zipline
launcher complement this tactical freedom,
as do the larger, tiered environs — you might
ascend to a garage roof in order to get a better
view, then zipline into the middle of the
enemy position, LMG at the ready. A later
encounter flips this around, calling on you to
hold the floors of a penthouse office against
SWAT troopers equipped with flashlights

and shotguns. Meanwhile, the frequency of
equipment crates, which allow loadouts to be
customised mid-mission without penalty, is
an incentive to experiment. This stems, says
Papoutsis, from the realisation that players
used only a fraction of Battlefield’s lovingly

crafted tools of destruction in past campaigns.

“They have their shotgun, they have their
pistol, and they’re done,” he explains, ruefully.
The arsenal is more diverse, too, taking in
weapons born of the new premise, such as
snub-nosed revolvers, nightsticks and tasers,

as well as old favourites, such as tactical
shotguns, sniper rifles and RPGs. As ever,
optional scopes, magazine modifications and
camo schemes are in abundance. There’s a
new progression system, however, which is
again designed to encourage players to try out
new toys as they progress. Those who opt for
noisy tactics earn points towards the Loose
Cannon bracket, while ninjas climb the ranks
in Perfectionist, with rewards for each. It’s
not quite Paragon versus Renegade — there
don’t appear to be plot repercussions for the
Die Hard approach — but it could lead to a
more flexible, replay-friendly shooter.
Hardline also seems a cleaner fit for stealth
than past Battlefields. Nonlethal takedowns
are cleverly handled: you’ll need to flash
Mendoza’s badge to hold up the target, then
keep them in your sights until you’re close
enough to slap on the cuffs. This is trickier
when more than one criminal is involved:

A grappling hook and zipline
launcher complement tactical
freedom, as do tiered environs

the longer a suspect is left, the greater the
risk of counterattack, and you can’t collar
enemies once they’re fighting you. Some foes
are subject to arrest warrants, which can be
cashed in provided you complete the job

and don’t waltz your mark into a trip mine.

It all adds up to the most promising
Battlefield singleplayer component in recent
memory, though there’s still room for
improvement. The open-ended tussles over
fortifications are an unambiguously good
move, as are the incentives to try out every
weapon in the locker, but there are still plenty
of humdrum sequences, such as missions in
which you follow an AI character’s scripted
lead. In this regard, as in its portrayal of
suburban deprivation, Hardline feels like a
transition project for Battlefield, a game that
hasn’t quite gone the distance. It’s testament,
at least, to Visceral’s creative chops that a
Battlefield campaign finally seems as worthy
of discussion as the multiplayer. If nothing
else, there will be something worthwhile to
do when the servers fall over on launch day. M

A touch
of frost

While still largely
DICE's creation, the
Frostbite engine has
become a company-
wide collaborative
project — each studio
that uses the tech
feeds ideas back into
a shared codebase.
"A lot of the fixes
that you see in the
wild for Battlefield 4
come from all across
the studios," says
Papoutsis. "It's a
collective effort to
improve the overall
stability for the games
using Frostbite."
Visceral's chief
contributions this
time consist of new
Al routines and
revised handling for
civilian cars. But, as
Papoutsis says, "There
are small things that
might not make a big
difference to people.
For instance, when
our cars collide in
multiplayer, they

can trade paint. And
we've added screen-
based reflections,
where ground

water might reflect
the characters."

TOP Rescue mode is a five-
on-five, six-round-long
challenge to save or defend
hostages. Death is also
permanent each round,
adding to the tension.
RIGHT Outpost assaults
borrow from the Far Cry
template, giving you several
ways to approach the base
and a tool with which to
tag up patrolling guards

TOP Hotwire mode places
the emphasis on vehicular
combat, the criminals
charged with grabbing
marked cars and then
making good their escape.
ABOVE Mendoza and his
partner, Khai Minh Dao, will
work increasingly off the
books, with corruption and
power themes of their tale.
MAIN The improvements to
Frostbite include the ability
to trade paint — something
you can expect to see a

lot of in Hotwire matches

Oscar Mike is Battleborn's
take on the vanilla FPS

grunt: assault rifle in hand,
frag grenades at the ready

BATTLEBORN

A postAliens Gearbox seeks

rebirth through the ‘hero shooter

Publisher
Developer
Format
Origin

Release |

2K Games
Gearbox Software
PC, PS4, Xbox One
US

2015

ith legal proceedings over Aliens:

Colonial Marines still rumbling on,

Gearbox's recent failures won't be
forgotten quickly. But while their influence
is felt in how we're shown Battleborn (more
on that later), this is a game that exhibits
more in common with the studio's greatest
homegrown success than its licensed letdown.
The hook is that it casts the net even wider
than Borderlands, harvesting bits of fighting
games and MOBAs as well as RPGs to splice
into the firstperson shooter, which can still be
considered the foundation of the gameplay.
Gearbox even has a name for its new
amalgamation: the hero shooter.

“A lot of the process by which we came
to create this came down to, ‘What would
you love to be able to ао?” design director
John Mulkey says. “What do you like from
different games, and can they work together?
The in-match levelling was a really cool
iteration on RPGs that we saw MOBAs were
pulling off. But we’ve pulled in a lot of things.”
The setting for Battleborn’s cross-genre

experiment is the last star left in the universe.
A race of spindly photophobic aliens known
as the Varelsi have extinguished all but this
one, and survivors from species across the
galaxy have convened on its surrounding
planets to fight back in fiveplayer co-op
and five-against-five competitive play.

The MOBA is felt most prominently in the
level design, in which arena-like settings are
punctuated by more linear areas that give
the campaign’s narrative time and space to
unfold. It’s also front and centre when the
Helix Menu, a level-up screen presented like a
DNA strand, appears — characters level up
roughly once a minute during every round,
each advance presenting you with a binary
choice: do you want faster movement speed
or more ammo? Damage or buffs? Then, a
minute later, there’s another decision to make.
It means character growth can be steered in
different directions depending on how a
round is going, and gives you the chance to
identify and fix weaknesses in your team.

With the game in what Mulkey describes
as “pre-pre-alpha”, he’s reticent to define the
longterm progression systems, but they’re
there, and they bring to mind another possible
influence that this time he doesn’t vocalise.
“At the top, you have a command level —
that’s your profile. And in your profile you
have many Battleborn that you collect.
They’re your action figures, you know?”

Is it reductive to hear this, drink in the
friendly art direction and think of Activision
cash cow Skylanders? Possibly. The action
figures in question are figurative, and as far as
Gearbox has mentioned thus far, not part of ж

FROM TOP Scott Kester,
art director; John
Mulkey, design director

Gearbox wants you to see
your favourite character
archetype from cinema,
literature or games within its
roster and bond with them on
those terms, as evidenced by
Thorn, the lithe elven archer

Though the universe's
inhabitable area has reduced
to the proximity of just one
star, the narrative doesn't
nix the possibility of
environmental variation

With one of the most
disproportionate head-to-
body ratios in videogames,
Montana's appearance belies
his gregarious nature. So far
he's hoarding all the best
mid-game one-liners, too

BATTLEBORN

а microtransaction ecosystem. But it suggests
a desire on the studio’s part to bring ina
younger audience. Art director Scott Kester
responds: “I think with this game, I visually
wanted to cast the net as big as I could. We
didn’t want a barrier that would lead people
to say, ‘No, I don’t want my kid to play that.”
Said child may take a while to grasp
Battleborn's metagame, though. *Each of your
Battleborn has a character level that raises
through earned experience,” says Mulkey.
“We also have earned currency, through which
you can purchase these packs of what we're
calling Salvage. So the Wolf Spider thing we
destroyed [during the gameplay demo], you
would get the head of that as a Salvage where
you can rip it open and inside are mods. You
can carry a number of those into each combat
with your character and apply them to a role.
“There are different tiers of rarity
associated with those, and there's a ton to

That's going to be the draw:
being the best kunai-slinging
fungus on the battlefield

explore. T'here's also going to be a crafting
system in which you can create those. There's
a huge amount of meta-gameplay there.” The
minute-by-minute levelling seems unlikely to
diminish your sense of ownership over a
character longterm, then. In fact, it's even
possible to unlock Mutations within the Helix
Menu that offer different choices as you level.

Would Street Fighter diehards recognise
their genre's tenets here, as Mulkey suggests?
Well, animations are all hand-drawn and
designed to emphasise one stance per action,
letting you know in an instant whether a
teammate just launched a special attack or
buffed you. “You know how in fighting games,
it’s mostly just poses, and a couple of frames
between those?” Mulkey asks. “That’s the way
we approach our characters. Scott goes in and
sets up key poses for each character, almost as
if it was a fighting game. So it’s like, ‘Here’s
the strikes; here's the recoils...’ And then we'll
build our animations off those key poses.”

It’s a subtle enough nod that you could
play through the campaign and never think of

Hadoukens, just as it’s conceivable that
without having played Dota 2 or League Of
Legends you could also mistake the MOBA
elements for a hyperactive take on RPG
staples. What’s unmistakably fresh about
Battleborn — and thus key to its potential
success — is that there’s a vast breadth of
playstyles possible via its broad cast. Each
hero is designed, Mulkey says, as if they were
“the main character in their own standalone
game”. Of the nine revealed so far, taking in
the likes of an even more steroidal incarnation
of Team Fortress 2’s Heavy and a mushroom
adept with throwing knives, none appear to
borrow each other’s animations, attack types
or playstyles. That’s going to be the draw:
being the best kunai-slinging fungus on the
battlefield and knowing the particular abilities
you offer (each character has three unique
powers, plus an Ultimate) can’t also be offered
by the next guy, barring the circumstance that
they’re playing as the same character, levelled
up in exactly the same way this round, and
carrying the exact same Salvage items.

While Gearbox showcases its new
game, however, two ghosts of past projects
haunt the presentation. By playing a pre-alpha
build live in front of journalists and making
us aware that mechanics and names might
change along the line, the studio wordlessly
acknowledges the lessons it learned about
transparency from the Colonial Marines mess.
But there’s something else about Battleborn
that’s almost embarrassing to write: it isn’t
Borderlands. This summer, studio head
Randy Pitchford suggested that expectations
for a third game might now be so high they
couldn’t possibly be met. To all intents and
purposes, no such game is in development.
Battleborn might be the studio resetting the
clock on those expectations, adjusting the
formula enough for this to be considered

a new project, even if it is one that keeps the
foundations of its celebrated series intact.
Given the longform leanings of the genres it
fuses, it'll take dozens of hours to uncover
whether that revised formula is as robust as
the one powering Borderlands. All we can be
certain of is that Gearbox is being careful
about what it promises — it knows more
than its reputation is on the line this time. BM

The hard cel

Before building
Battleborn's art style
from the ground up
as art director, Scott
Kester played a key
role in developing
Borderlands' cel-
shaded (or if you're
Randy Pitchford,
absolutely not cel-
shaded) visuals, and
designed most of the
main characters in
the first and second
games. "| started on
Borderlands 1 before
the style change," he
says. "We had to redo
a bunch of it, but
there was a starting
point. This one was a
challenge, because we
started with nothing.
We re-used nothing."
Could the studio's
penchant for radical
rethinking affect the
work he's done so
far on Battleborn?

"| don't think it's
necessarily studio
policy to go, 'Hey, it's
the 11th hour, let's
change everything!’
Please, God, | hope!"

TOP LEFT The Varelsi's many
sharp angles seem to bleed
plumes of darkness into the
air as they encroach on your
position. Dip Slender Man in
an inkwell and we imagine
you'd have the same effect.
TOP RIGHT This being a quasi-
MOBA, the vast majority of
your enemies come in
minion form, like these
easily dismembered robots.
MAIN Melee-centric Rath is
art director Scott Kester's
personal passion project,

so adamant is he on the
merits of including a dual-
katana-wielding playstyle

FAR LEFT The clean art style
is as dictated by necessity as
emotion — any fussier and all
the information presented
to you could easily begin

to overwhelm the screen.
LEFT Battleborn's animations
take the idea of Team
Fortress 2's instantly legible
silhouettes one step further,
letting you know what every
player's doing via bold poses

Publisher SCEE
Developer
Media Molecule
Format P54
Origin UK
Release 2015

TEARAWAY

UNFOLDED

Bigger, better, more cauliflowers

nfolded's not quite a remake, but nor is

it a sequel, and that's far from the only

unconventional thing about Tearaway's
translation to PS4. Media Molecule certainly
has a few unusual ideas about how to use all
the extra horsepower the console offers over
Vita. ^We've got a few levels that have infinite
cauliflowers being chucked around,” says
creative lead Rex Crowle, before explaining
how the vegetable has fallen out of favour.
“They’re hard to buy these days,” he says
sadly. ^We're trying to bring them back.”

That's entirely in keeping with Tearaway's

plucky underdog spirit. Adored by critics but
widely overlooked, this inventive papercraft
platformer was an ode to the unfashionable,
as much a love letter to its host hardware
as to the material its world was built from.
It's strange, then, to see it being brought to
another platform, particularly when Crowle

admits “we really wanted it to feel almost
like Tearaway had always been inside of the
Vita, and somehow it was just revealed to
you when the game launched"

Unfolded came to be after Media
Molecule saw its game on the biggest of big
screens on Sony's stage at E3. The boldness
of the art held up, and the subtle details and
environmental animations were easier to
discern across a larger canvas. So the studio
knew that visually Tearaway would shine

on a ТУ screen, but how would the game
itself — and, perhaps more pertinently, its
control scheme — translate?

Rather than remapping features, Crowle
was keen to take a fresh approach. At first, he
invited his team to treat DualShock 4 not as a
videogame controller, but as an alien artefact.
“Imagine you just found it and [were] trying

LEFT Unfolded will give its
players more room to take in
their environment, though
Crowle is keen to avoid
reusing chunks of levels to
increase the game's runtime.
"We're trying to let each
section introduce itself a
little bit more, so you feel
like you're travelling across
this world rather than just
jumping from one intense
section to the next"

Media Molecule's Rex
Crowle, creative lead
on Tearaway Unfolded

Crowle fondly acknowledges
past 3D platformers like
Rare's StarFox Adventures as
a key influence. "[They're]
just really nice worlds to
settle into and return to"

to investigate it, and work out what it's for,
and you don't necessarily have all the baggage
of what it's supposed to be used for.”

Crowle says it was equally crucial for
players to still feel they were able to influence
the game world without being able to directly
push their fingers into it, which presented a
challenge. Using the DualShock 4 touchpad
as a touchscreen replacement made no sense,
given the extra degree of separation between
the player's digits and the game world, yet
the notion of paper moving and transforming
in the style of a popup book was considered
an essential part of the equation.

The trick to solving this particular
dilemma, Crowle explains, was to honestly
address the hardware differences and
acknowledge the space between the player
and the ТУ screen. “There is [now] a gulf
between the character in the world and you
outside it, and we've played with that a little
more,” he says. “That’s where one of the core
mechanics comes from — the idea that the
messenger can pick up items and then throw
them out of the game for you to catch in your
controller. But obviously, as the game goes
on, we want to give that feeling that the
distance between the two of you is slowly
decreasing, that you're getting closer."

After several early ‘feature jams? the new
wind mechanic was born. You can use the
controller's touchpad to send powerful gusts
into the world, parting seas and sending
Atoi or Iota — the game's returning pair of
envelope-headed player characters — flying
through the air. You'll be passing over the

While the world is larger,
you won't be staring at mini-
maps or laying waypoint
after waypoint. "We spent a
long time playing with the
scale," Crowle says, "trying
to work out what sort of
environment we could have
with the least amount of
interface to explore it with"

same environments as before, but they've
been expanded significantly and offer greater
rewards to tempt you from the beaten track.
Elsewhere, the controller's light bar
can be shone into the world, enabling you to
illuminate and investigate darkened areas
and to reveal pathways for your messenger
to traverse. And yet with the player's almost
deific presence in mind, it's much more than
just a torch. *There's nothing very heavenly
about a giant Maglite,” Crowle admits.
“I wanted to play up the awe of the world,
like in a religious painting where you see
the god rays streaming down.” Though he’s
reluctant to reveal all the ways in which the
mechanic will be used, it's clear that the
game's creatures are set to spend a little
more time in the spotlight. Some will be
terrified by your godlike influence, while
others will relish their chance to show off.

“We wanted to push the
comedy element further to
bring out more personality”

Meanwhile, the Scraps, Tearaway’s impish
antagonists, can be hypnotised with the light
and then dragged around the screen. It’s part
of a more playful, slapstick approach to the
game’s already mild combat that emphasises
the reactions of your enemies. “We didn’t
want to suddenly stick in an Arkham Asylum-
style combat system,” Crowle says, “[but] we
wanted to push the comedy element further
to bring out more personality in both the
characters you’re dealing with and the powers
you’re using on them. So with the Scraps, you
can cause a lot more mayhem in their plans,
rather than just having to run around picking
them up and throwing them off cliffs.”

What Tearaway loses in intimacy in the
translation to Sony’s home console, it looks
to more than compensate for in character and
scope, taking a markedly different route on
its way to a familiar destination. It’s certainly
more than just a simple port, with Crowle
and his team evidently keen to make Atoi
and Iota feel as much at home within your
ТУ set as they ever were inside a Vita. M

Shoot the

messenger

With the original
game using Vita's
cameras to great
effect, it's no surprise
to learn Media
Molecule will be
supporting Р54%5
camera peripheral.
Those who have it can
take photos to use in
the game, and the
studio has been
experimenting with
other ideas. "We're
using motion tracking
So you can wave [at
Atoi] and she'll wave
back at you," Crowle
explains. "I really
enjoy games where it
feels like you have a
magical connection to
it even when you're
not pressing any
buttons." Crowle also
teases nontraditional
co-op, saying the
team is looking

into creative and
collaborative ways for
others to influence
your world while
you're playing.

Publisher Sega
Developer Sonic Team
Format PS4, Xbox One

Origin Japan
Release December 4

PUYO PUYO TETRIS

Sonic leam proves two puzzlers can be better than one

made: its premise is simplicity itself, its
endless nature and lack of win state as
compulsive as gaming gets. Puyo Puyo is better
known in Japan than the west, but its rules are
equally straightforward (match four coloured
blobs) and its appeal as universal.
Developed by Sonic Team, Puyo Puyo
Tetris is a fusion with a wealth of play modes,
including standalone versions of each game.
These are available to play solo or in matches
of up to four players, locally or online, with
each selecting their puzzler of choice. Score
big with T-spins, back-to-back combos or
perfect clears to dump junk blocks on your
foes’ grids, pushing them towards a game over.
But the two most absorbing modes are the
ones that ask you to play both titles at once.

T etris is arguably the best puzzle game yet

There's an arcade madness
to it that can be ludicrously
difficult but highly rewarding

Puyo-Tet-Mix mode merges them onto one
play grid: your next block may be a four-
square tetrimino or a two-blob puyo, the
former filling up the screen as it lands at
the bottom, with the latter resting on top of
your stack. Falling tetriminoes temporarily
dislodge any puyos in their path with a
satisfying squidge, but puyos reappear atop
the landed blocks. This lends the game an
extra layer of strategy, since the puyos' new
location may well line them up with others of
the same colour, prompting a new chain, while
any junk blobs squashed by the tetriminoes
disappear completely. The biggest points
come from sparking a mixed chain of the
two types of blocks with a single move.
Balancing both sets of puzzles in Puyo-
Tet-Mix mode requires focus, but Swap mode
demands even more. Here the grid alternates
between Tetris and Puyo Puyo games at timed
intervals, requiring you to remember what is

happening in both and strategise accordingly.
There's a frantic arcade madness to it that can
be ludicrously difficult but highly rewarding.
In Big Bang mode, the player must fill gaps
on a prerendered Tetris board with like-
shaped tetriminoes (Lucky Attack) or find the
right spot on a Puyo Puyo board to trigger a
combo chain that will clear all the blobs in
one go (Fever Mode), all with the pressure of
a ticking timer. Moving quickly means
clearing more stages before time runs out.
Fortunately, there's a comprehensive set
of tutorials to help you get your head around
it all, offering beginner and advanced tips for
these game types. Finally, there's a story
mode, in which anthropomorphised Tetris and
Puyo Puyo characters proffer challenges such
as clearing a specified number of lines within
a set time, reaching a certain number of
points, or simply beating the CPU opponent.

The package is presented in bold colours
with a chunky cartoon style, and character
voices egg players on and call out the names
of special moves as though it were a fighting
game, lending an action-like sheen that suits
a competitive play session. The inclusion of a
new version of the classic Tetris theme music,
based on Russian folk song Korobeiniki, is an
additional sonic treat.

By mixing together two classic puzzle
games, Sonic Team has somehow managed to
find ways to improve upon them both, with
modes to suit newcomers and hardcore fans
alike. And yet while Ubisoft's Tetris Ultimate
prepares to land on several platforms and
in every territory to mark the series' 3oth
anniversary, Sega's title currently remains
confined to Japan only, a situation as puzzling
as any number of mismatched blocks.

Still, the intuitive mechanics and minimal
reliance on text make Puyo Puyo Tetris an easy
import, and with versions already out for 360
PS3, Wii U, Vita and 3DS, plus PS4 and Xbox
One versions soon to drop, it should slot
neatly into any player's library. M

Mental blocks

Since little coloured
blobs or four-block
shapes don't have
much personality,

in Puyo Puyo Tetris
they have been
anthropomorphised
into cute cartoon
characters, each with
their own backstory.
These include J and L
as manifestations of
the Tetris pieces of
those shapes, so easily
confused for one
another during play
and thus rendered
here as twins. There's
also I, a cowardly

but smart dog who
bizarrely is the Tetris
spaceship crew's
engineer. There’s a
plot, too: the Tetris
characters have fallen
from the sky (of
course) into the
puyos’ world, and a
rivalry between them
spurs many story
mode challenges,
though everyone
seems to tessellate
pretty well eventually.

T اس‎
ЕГЕН

= ЕШ pr 22 тг! г
Куз. Е Y yee DEH кш" C „шй uas) pum لس‎
= а | аср J
мәт” Жуа ا‎ a
کے ا‎ T
A \ D ен

2. PE A Can Ji
— Sd iei
Beat Pete E
ете y: сы | |
— | A |

1] es тері a

E eee ді m ат mie Fus

rica ТЕГТЕРДІ! aan Е is

"и mee ^i] 57 пыл
ч nyai Elena) Pisis) ERA

Wor Briers ete (н-т

MAIN Big Bang mode
presents timed puzzle
challenges, either triggering
a predetermined chain on a
Puyo Puyo grid or clearing
set stacks with specific
tetriminoes on a Tetris one.
RIGHT Up to four players can
compete in matches at once,
selecting their choice of
Tetris or Puyo Puyo playstyle

ERU
= w=
5 82228

NULLI

PLIYOPUYO TETRIS |

CUm
ж” Ч

TOP LEFT Online play is a
major part of the package,
with delight to be found in
duelling a worthy opponent.
TOP The excellent Puyo-Tet-
Mix mode has you playing
both games at once, with
Tetris blocks lining up on
the bottom rows and Puyo
Puyo blobs above them.
ABOVE Play well and you'll
shower garbage blocks
onto the opposition's
grids, pushing them ever
closer towards failure

Alla

басс

Publisher/developer
Iridium Studios
Format PC, Xbox One
Origin US

Release 2014

Jason Wishnov, lead
designer at Iridium

This helicopter is piloted by
the sarcastic Adam. It's used
early on in the game to
extract Corrin and Miranda
after the former learns a
mysterious organisation
wants to use his encryption
algorithm for nefarious ends

THERE CAME AN ECHO

Iridium Studios is making realtime strategy more personal

Iternative control schemes have rather

fallen from grace since Microsoft's

Kinect proposition flopped and the
device received a demotion back to peripheral
status. It's a trend Jason Wishnov, lead
designer on voice-controlled RTS There Came
An Echo, is keenly aware of, though he faults
the implementations, not the central idea.

*'The games that have used alternative
control schemes haven't tended to have the
depth, narrative or gameplay experience that
core gamers, or whatever you want to call
them, have come to expect,” he says. “I mean,
name a Kinect title that has the precision and
depth of a game like Bayonetta 2, a modern
FPS, or anything really. The games that tend
to come out are exercise games, Dance Central,
or that Sesame Street game by Double Fine —
all of which are pretty fun, but they're not
something that's going to appeal to a large
segment of the traditional gamer population.
So I'm trying to break the mould; I'm trying
to legitimise an alternative control scheme as
something that's OK for a game that hopefully
has quite a bit of depth. But it's an uphill
battle, and a difficult perception challenge.”

On early evidence, the Iridium team might
just be on track to overturn the common
perception. While we initially had some
problems with characters not responding to
orders in the alpha build, last-minute tweaks
to the game's British accent recognition
delivered an immeasurable improvement.
And when There Came An Echo's systems
coalesce, the effect is wondrous.

Characters can be ordered by name, or you
can tell *everybody" or *everybody but" to do
something. You can also ask your charges to
swap between their weapons — a standard
pistol and one of four special guns, which
include a sniper rifle and a grenade launcher
— and change batteries, which power both
special weapons and shields. Plus, you can add
*on my mark" to synchronise your commands
before booming *mark" into the mic like
you're starring in an action thriller.

While There Came An Echo isn't the first
game to use voice commands to control
troops — Tom Clancy's EndWar and Odama
preceded it — it's a more intimate one thanks
to its much tighter focus, resulting in a more
personal relationship between you and those
you're ordering into the firing line.

“Гуе always been a huge fan of narrative
in games," Wishnov says. *I think EndWar
missed a really great opportunity. In that
game, you were just ordering these generic
army soldier guys — you didn't really feel
much for them and it didn't matter if they
died. But with There Came An Echo, I really
wanted to reinforce that relationship and
make you care about the characters. You're
responsible for their welfare, and if they
die, it's probably your fault."

Thankfully, fallen comrades can be
revived with a burst of electricity, while the
forcefields that surround each fighter will
take a reasonable amount of punishment
before giving in. Cover further bolsters

your team’s chances of survival, offering a
defensive bonus by reducing enemy accuracy.

“Tt’s a fine balance to want to strike,”
Wishnov explains. “If you’ve lined up your
soldiers in an optimal position, and the
enemy soldiers have done the same, then
you'd theoretically just sit there as bullets fly
back and forth, and that’s pretty boring. So
we're trying to achieve this feeling of urgency,
but at the same time we couldn’t make it too
intense — like, say, StarCraft — because you’re
inherently limited in your actions per minute
due to the speed of voice.”

Those orders will be delivered even more
slowly if the kind of creative swearing born of
unresponsive controls is ever a factor, and
while traditional inputs are supported, There
Came An Echo clearly depends on its vocal
interface being near flawless. But when you’re
barking at agents to flank the enemy and it’s
all working as planned, it’s uncommonly easy
to get swept up in the moment. Ё

Long shadow

While There Came An
Echo looks like a 2D
isometric setup in
screenshots, it blends
2D backgrounds with
3D geometry. “The
environments in the
game are actually all
hand-painted 2D
sprites,” Wishnov
explains. “But

then we create 3D
geometry and make
it invisible — it’s
completely invisible
unless light is being
cast upon it, or in the
absence of light to
create shadow. Then
that's placed very
precisely in front

of the sprite in an
orthographic camera
to show the 2D sprite
but still have the
lighting and shadows
fall correctly on the
structure. So it creates
a pseudo-3D effect.”

f
I
L SHUT ШЕ |

DUE

TOP The first mission in the
game, which feels like a
cross between the Matrix
and Bourne films, requires
you to guide Corrin through
an office block as you avoid
the men sent to kill him.
ABOVE Preceding your order
with "everybody" allows you
to quickly instruct groups,
but your team members can
be individually ordered too.
MAIN You're restricted to
ordering units to highlighted
waypoints on the map. It
doesn't feel as restrictive

as it may seem, however,
and they're usually sensibly
placed throughout the levels

TOP Enemies' health is
displayed as a green bar
above their heads. They're
also assigned numbers so
you can order your team to
focus fire on a chosen unit.
RIGHT You can zoom in and
out with the mouse, or an
Xbox 360 controller, to get
a better view of the area,
though the game often takes [RO ———— 9
control of the camera for
the in-engine cutscenes

ROUNDUP

WHERE THE WATER
TASTES LIKE WINE

Publisher/developer Dim Bulb Games Format PC
Origin US Release TBC

CAPTAIN TOAD: TREASURE TRACKER

Publisher/developer Nintendo (EAD Tokyo) Format Wii U Origin Japan Release Out now (JP), December 5 (US), January 9 (EU)

Having spent his time as programmer on Gone Home coding
interiors, Johnnemann Nordhagen's next project is heading
outdoors. A road trip of sorts, it's an adventure about sharing
stories with fellow travellers while creating your own, with
backpacking, Steinbeck, Kerouac and Twain as influences.

EVOLVE

Publisher 2K Developer Turtle Rock Studios Format PC, PS4,
Xbox One Origin US Release February 10 (EU)

After a diverting cameo in Super Mario 3D World, EAD Tokyo's intrepid adventurer gets a mid-priced game of his very own.

It follows a similar format to his 3D World stages: you guide the Captain with the left stick and rotate the worlds he explores
with the right one, shifting your perspective to tease out hidden secrets en route to a power star at the end of the course.

Each stage also has three gems to locate and an additional objective to encourage repeat plays. Handsome and unhurried, this
solo outing is perhaps a little too straightforward in its early stages, though we're confident the challenge will steepen later on.

RETURN OF THE OBRA DINN

Publisher/developer Lucas Pope Format PC Origin Japan Release TBA

2K's 'Big Alpha' could have gone better. After matchmaking
issues and a delay for PS4 owners after issues with firmware
2.0, the trial run will have discouraged many whose interest
was aroused by glowing E3 reports. And the game itself?
Entertaining but unbalanced. Turtle Rock has work to do.

AXIOM VERGE

Publisher SCE Developer Tom Happ Format PC, PS4, Vita
Origin US Release 2015

А world away from Papers, Please, Pope's next game is a firstperson mystery set aboard a 19th
century merchant ship. A short playable section from an early build sees you investigating the
corpse-strewn craft, using a pocket watch to rewind time to the moment of each character's
death. Its '1bit' art style is as distinctive as its sound design is evocative, and with splendid
voice work even at this early stage, it's a teaser that makes us keen to discover more. Happ has spent five years' worth of evenings and weekends
working on this 16bit-style sidescroller, which aims to put a
contemporary spin on its timeworn Metroid template. You'll
glitch through walls and drill through blocks, while using an
expansive arsenal to deal with imposing and repulsive bosses.

ЕГІП ЕТТЕ цец ойо ap aae SEPE juo үү "Jue duico әшез ap po xieurapen e si. px e, "osi Up ues E] QU kei das AN jo ees pomp arse ungerckej pue gr.

PLAYSTATION.4 GAMES
CALENDAR 2014-15

YOUR GUIDE TO WHAT'S ON PTA.

NOVEMBER

44 CALL OF DUTY: ADVANCED WARFARE E GRAND THEFT AUTO V

513 PRO EvoLUTION SOCCER 2015 121 DRAGON AGE: INQUISITION
14 ЕСО ВАТМАМ 3: ВЕҮОМО СОТНАМ 421 мм 2к15
414 ASSASSIN'S CREED: UNITY 429 LITTLEBIGPLANET 3

SET] rARcCRYA
DECEMBER
214 CREW 19 DESTINY EXPANSION I: THE DARK BELOW DLC

COMING IN 2015

р
d

23 SAINTS ROW IV RE-ELECTED & GAT OUT OF HELL MORTAL COMBAT X
A30 DYING LIGHT BATMAN: ARKHAM KNIGHT
4 6 BLOODBORNE UNTIL DAWN
ol EVOLVE METAL GEAR SOLID V: THE PHANTOM PAIN
220 BR GIOI REST: DEAD ISLAND 2
124 THE WITCHER 3: WILD HUNT RESIDENT EVIL REMASTERED
120 PROJECT CARS PGA TOUR
120 BATTLEFIELD: HARDLINE E] TEARAWAY: UNFOLDED
120 FINAL FANTASY TYPE 0 ЕШ UNCHARTED 4: A ТНІЕҒ5 END

VISIT UK.PLAYSTATION.COM/PS4/GAMES
TO FIND OUT MORE AND VIEW FUTURE RELEASES

[Lor

SUBSCRIBE TO

EDGE

Subscribe to our print edition or digital edition — or get the best

possible value with our complete print and digital bundle

CHOOSE YOUR PACKAGE

CUN ы... A pe ; "
«Нуе... UTENTE PERF

TWENTY
YEARS OF |
PLAYSTATION |
HOW PS] INVENTED
THE MODERN )
VIDEOGAME

CAN CHRIS ОК
TCOLOSSAL RETURN TO zy]

N WIN % 2 RACE?
* | "и | ار‎
^ /

Review М

PLAYSTATION TV
ON TEST

THE MAKING OF

#274 NO MORE HEROES

Every issue delivered to
your door days before
it reaches the shops

ONLY £19.99

Your subscription will then continue at £19.99
every six months, saving 38% on the shop price

DIGITAL

can CHRIS ROME

celle RETURN TO е

W WNTH Е RAC
*
X

Instant digital access on your iPad
and iPhone. Including exclusive content,
video and image galleries on iPad

ONLY £12.99

Your subscription will then continue at £12.99
every six months, saving 50% on the shop price

GET THE COMPLETE PACKAGE
PRINT * DIGITAL

Every new issue in

E
print and on iPad PLAY STAT i

and iPhone = кш

T EDITION
|!

Never miss an issue,
with delivery to your |

ENTY ||
door and your device „EARS оғ ЧЫ

HOW P5] INVENTED

THE ACIDE Ki
МЕСЕ

game trailers and
screenshot galleries

on iPad

Huge savings, the best
value for money, and a
money-back guarantee

Mil

TANG,
ЫП EARTH

^W Noo

[m
ВЕЧО

Instant digital access
when you begin o

subscription today! ONLY £23.99

Your subscription will then continue at £23.99 every six months, saving 38% on the shop price and giving you an 85% discount on a digital subscription

TWO EASY WAYS TO SUBSCRIBE

ONLINE [73 mytavouritemagazines.co.uk/edgesubs
CALL 0844 848 2852 (Please quote PRINTIA, DIGITALA or BUNDLE14]

TERMS AND CONDITIONS Prices and savings quoted are compared to buying full priced UK print and digital issues. You will receive 13 issues in
a year. If you are dissatisfied in any way you can write to us or call us to cancel your subscription at any time and we will refund you for all unmailed
issues. Prices correct at point of print and subject to change. For full terms and conditions please visit: myfavm.ag/magterms. Offer ends: 31/01/2015

EDGE 55

ee @@ ЖЕТ

Now fully interactive on your iPad

| Е He | “ТИЛИ
КД? | 1 Ж S m

+
s

1 MIELE BRADLEY COOPER

B. edidisse ON AMERICAN SNIPER

GREATEST Movie J ЕИ о ЧЕЛ, CHANNING TATUM
^ ARTIUM ON FONCATCHER

Search for ‘Total Film’ in App Store
www.totalfilm.com/newsstand

* Download two free issues with a no obligation subscription. Offer applies to new subscribers only.
iPadis atrademark of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries. App Store is a service mark of Apple Inc.

SONY
B

PlayStation

SELECT START

Mindeme I ب‎ cts

Explore the iPad edition
of Edge for extra
feature content

VIDEOGAME CULTURE, DEVELOPMENT, PEOPLE AND TECHNOLOGY

Space Craft

PlayStation: The Story
Behind The Brand

Collected Works:
Ted Price

The Making Of...
No More Heroes

Studio Profile: ms
Ubisoft Montreal PY

Time Extend:
Vanquish

3 WIE- (S

EEUU ep ш —

Dj ma,

Chris Roberts has gigantic ambition and the most
successful crowdfunding campaign in history

behind him. What is he doing with it?

By Marr CLAPHAM

n the edge of known space, we
centre the object in our meteor-
scratched canopy and hit the
thrusters. In fime, it begins to loom
large in our vision, monolithic and
yet somehow indistinct, its obsidian,
almost too perfect alien surface melding into the
pervading blackness. Clearly it's colossal, but it's also
beguilingly mysterious. Yet the problem isn't really
a lack of information: early probes have returned
full of data, it's just that much of it is apparently
contradictory and there's plenty of disagreement
over what it all means. The object is Star Citizen,
and the only conclusion everyone seems truly happy
with is that it's made a hell of a lot of money.

That could not be more perfectly calculated to
wind up Chris Roberts, the creator of the beloved
Wing Commander series, CEO of Cloud Imperium
Games and chief creative officer on Star Citizen.

"| do get a bit disappointed," he admits. "I mean, it's
today's news cycle... If you're on the online 24/7
game blog, they don't have time to [do in-depth
articles], so they're always about the headline. So

"RIGHT NOW | THINK WE'RE ESTIMATING

SOMETHING LIKE 50 HOURS TO PLAY
THROUGH THE FULL NARRATIVE STORY"

for them it's like, ‘Oh, Star Citizen's made X million
or X million,’ and everything focuses on the money.
And then you can read it and say, ‘Vell, all they
care about is the money.' Not really."

It is the distorting weight of $60m and counting,
raised by some 640,000 backers, which has seen
the developer variously accused of running a cult, a
scam and, thanks to the $30 to $15,000 game
packages on the Roberts Space Industries site, a pay-
towin operation. Alternatively, for the faithful, this is
the second coming of Chris Roberts after a ten-year
break from games. But Star Citizen's even harder to
get a read on: it's a space dogfighting game, only
with ships big enough to walk around and live in,
except when it's an FPS, set in an online universe.

The list of features defies credulity, but if Star
Citizen is a con, it might be the worstrun one on the
planet. For starters, it's intensely public, with Chris
often making appearances on game expo stages to
reveal more in-engine footage. Secondly, while only
a sliver of what's promised, the dogfighting and
hangar modules are both in public hands already,
the former the beneficiary of a huge update in recent
weeks (see ‘Reality engine’). Some 110 Cloud
Imperium staff have accounts on LinkedIn, and these
are not sock puppets, but people who have portfolio
sites and histories at Crytek, BioWare and Activision.

As slight as accountability in crowdfunding projects
may be, the conspiracy theory doesn't stack up.
Chris refutes the pay-+to-win accusations himself:
"The design of the game, and this is just personal
preference, because | hate it in free-to-play games, is
there's nothing that you can buy with money that you
can't earn in the game." The packages are pledge
tiers, their values set to offer funding options. Come
release, the basic starting package is all you'll need.

The problem for outside observers is really
scale. Baffling, mind-boggling scale. "We're
essentially giving them four huge games all in one,"
Chris explains. "Squadron 42 is going to be what,
or better than what, a nextgeneration Wing
Commander would have been, and that's just by
itself. And its level of fidelity — | mean, the scope and
the size of the story and the missions we're doing in
it is huge. | mean, l'm pretty sure if | was doing
another Wing Commander for EA, | don't think they
would allow me to do as much content. Because
right now | think we're estimating something like 50
hours or so to play through the full narrative story.

"| mean, it's so big we're going to release it
in episodes. Think of it as a miniseries, like five
episodes. So the first episode is what we're going
to release next year = well, hopefully there are two

EDGE

FROM TOP Chris Roberts is

chief creative officer on Star
Citizen and the co-founder of
Cloud Imperium Games; Erin
Roberts is studio director of
Foundry 42, which is creating
the singleplayer campaign

episodes next year, but for the first one | think we're
aiming for Gamescom. But the first episode itself is
about ten hours of gameplay. So compared to
modern FPS games, that's more than you get in
most of the campaign modes with a Call Of Duty.
"And then, of course, there's whole persistent
[online] universe. You've got the 4X space game
style, because if you don't want to get into combat,
you can go into building a business up or building
a trade empire and doing all that kind of stuff. And
then we've got the FPS section. So someone could
make a game just by itself from any one of these."

Ambition of this scale takes not one studio, but
five, each working on separate modules of the
game. While Chris heads up development on
the persistent universe in Los Angeles, CIG also
has satellites in Texas and California. IllFonic, a
relatively unknown quantity whose output includes the
lukewarmly received Nexuiz, is in charge of the FPS
module. Rather more promisingly, Erin Roberts is
studio director of the Manchesterbased Foundry 42,
entrusted with creating the singleplayer campaign,
Squadron 42. Unlike his brother, Erin never left the
industry, but after producing Wing Commander: №

EDGE

LEFT Every ship is astonishingly detailed, and built to work under
physical laws. BELOW In-cockpit furnishing is no less exacting. The
two expanded Arena Commander maps - with star-hearted rock
and orbital platform centrepieces — show off the dynamic lighting

ты 1m

— m шыны.
== =
— —

WHACK

PLANET

"Originally, [landing on
planets] was more like
Freelancer or Privateer,"
says Chris, "where you
landed to fix your ship or
buy new equipment or buy
a new ship or get missions
- like a glorified shopping
and mission interface.
Whereas now we're on a
very capable firstperson
engine, so there's a lot
more you can do. We're
starting to look at PvE.

| don't want you to go to
the planet and think, 'Oh,
I'm in a PvP gankfest...'
because I think that would
be fairly stressful. There'll
be some areas in space
where people will feel like
that, but that's OK because
you can maybe avoid those
areas. Planets should be
more of a safe haven. But
that doesn't mean the
environment or NPCs
themselves don't interact
with you, and couldn't also
potentially be dangerous.
So if you land on a rough-
and-tumble planet on the
edge of UEE space, and go
down a dark alleyway to
go in this back room to do
a deal to get a mission,
potentially a couple of
NPC muggers could try to
take you out. So you can
whip out your gun, Han
Solo-style, shoot them,
and go about your day."

SPACE CRAFT

REALITY

The dogfighting module, AKA
Arena Commander, is one part
testbed for the developers,
but it's also a bottle universe
for generating community
feedback. While version 0.9.1
gave pilots a feel for the
Newtonian physics and fly-by-
wire systems that underpin
Star Citizen's flight model, it
was clinical and overzealous
in its simulation, with clumsy
fine control and a targeting
HUD that felt like chasing
boxes in space rather than
deadly opponents. The 0.9.2
update is a spectacular
improvement. Targeting has
been entirely reworked, with
a cleaner HUD and the game
now generating projected

GINE

impact points from either your
viewpoint or fixed gun reticle to
align with foes, the emphasis
restored to watching enemies
and reading their moves. Fine
control is also improved, a
predictive system deadening
stick inputs a little when
you're lining up a target to
provide granular control. The
result is a flight system that
not only affords a sense of real
momentum and simulates
g-force to the extent that fast
turns with the safeties off will
cause you to black or red out,
but is taught and exciting.

It's a promising sign for other
modules and Star Citizen's
overall path to a cohesive,
entertaining universe.

Privateer 2 and helming Starlancer, he wound up at
TT Fusion making lego games. Though he enjoyed it,
he took little convincing to rejoin his brother to make
Chris's self-professed "crazy dream”.

Erin's part is certainly the easiest to contextualise.
Taking place before the timeline of the persistent
universe, Squadron 42's arc tells the story of a war
between the alien Vanduul and United Empire of
Earth (UEE). The setup is battle-worn: you'll play the
rookie working your way up the ranks. You start with
a light fighter, the Gladius, waiting in your hangar,
earning the right to fly more advanced craft over
time. But Erin explains there's been a gestalt shift that
defines Star Citizen; Wing Commander has long
been famous for its firstperson view on the cockpit,
but pilots here will be free to tear open the canopy
and stretch their legs. “It’s not, for me, really a space
combat game," he says. “It's actually an FPS game
where you use vehicles. So, ‘cause you're always a
person, you [might] decide to fly a ship, get in a
ground vehicle, or go places and walk around."

So while the storyline's linear, momentto-moment
gameplay is anything but dictatorial. Ronald D

ship, having conversations, and suddenly there's an
attack. Vanduul have boarded and you've got to run
to the armoury to get your weapons fo go fend them
off, and then fight your way to the flight deck. And
then you get in your ship and take it out, and chase
after the Vanduul and destroy them."

This, Erin explains, is the direct benefit of all
that overfunding. "It allows us to really push a
bunch of stuff we weren't planning to do originally.
If it just stayed very small at the beginning, then
[Squadron 42] would have very much been just a
smaller, much more focused space thing. The sort
of way Elite: Dangerous is going about things, |
guess." That's not to disparage David Braben's
own return to the genre — Chris is a backer, as are
many of the Manchester team = but Star Citizen
has the funds to expand its focus.

“One of the big locations in the game is a huge
mining base," Erin tells us, “and it's like 6km, well,
‘big’. It's huge. It's got 26 landing platforms on it
which can fit large ships — | mean, like big old
transports and things like that — and each of these
locations are places you can go."

Bjorn Seinstra, lead vehicle
artist and environment artist

"IT'S NOT, FOR ME, REALLY A SPACE
COMBAT GAME. IT'S ACTUALLY AN
FPS GAME WHERE YOU USE VEHICLES"

It's not simply physical scale, either. Across the
hour we spend with Erin, he touches tantalisingly on
the topics of dropships to tly, popping out in your
EVA suit to perform mid-mission spacewalks to get
around problems, and calling for air support from
inside a location. It sounds like mad overpromising
until you consider that PAX Australia gave the world
its first glimpse of Star Citizen's considered, tactical
gunplay before capping it off with a less constrained
zerog shootout, soldiers and pirates locked in an
aerial ballet as they pushed off from walls and
dodged floating crates. Perhaps most attractively of
all, because many of Squadron 425 systems have
hooks in the persistent universe, they have been built
to work in dynamic, unscripted environments, not just
for setpieces. A linear tale may deploy them that
way, but Erin stresses the primacy of choice.

Yet the power to choose may mean you never
experience his work: in the final release, the entire
Squadron 42 campaign will be optional. Still,
according to Erin, you can opt out more dramatically
than clicking 'no thanks' after character creation.
^We're going о give you the ability to pretty much
mutiny. So you may decide you're going to be an
evil pirate, and you go and shoot your captain in the
back of the head and make an escape... Obviously
that puts an end to the campaign for you." Я

Moore's Battlestar Galactica is namechecked before
Erin describes 1km long battlecruisers with explorable
interiors, and how ships are modelled down to the
latrines and manufacturer's marks on the rivets. It
seems one such capital ship will serve as a hub and
home for a time, with you at liberty to wander its
cateterias and halls between spells in the cockpit.

The idea is to give a sense of a living place,
so the people on board are just as important as

the immaculately rendered bulwarks. Crews will
assemble in the canteen at lunch, then scuttle off to
service hangar craft, and key NPCs will catch your
eye if they want a quick chat. Dialogue option lists
are out, a body language and reputation system in
their place. Stay and listen to a garrulous wingman's
tall tales in a bar and he might form a closer bond
with you that means more help out among the stars;
get him going and dash off mid-sentence and he
might give you the cold shoulder instead.

"| mean, it's crazy," says Chris, "because the
VVing Commander format was that you fly your
mission in space, shoot a bunch of stuff up, and
then you come back onto the ship, you have some
conversations and the story advances, and you
basically rinse and repeat that. This is not like that.
It's completely fluid. You can be going around your

EDGE

SPACE CRAFT

These choice-based systems are set to reach
maturation in the persistent universe, which blends a
game-shaping economy simulation with a massively
multiplayer sandbox universe. Yet as you explore its
110 star systems, and around 400 planned landing
locations, you should notice them tree of tired old
MMOG design. "I kind of feel like in a lot of online
games, especially as you get to the higher levels,
you get forced into a social dynamic,” says Chris.
"OK, I'm 80th level in World Of Warcraft and ‘уе
got to be in my raid group... We don't have levels in
Star Citizen. | don't want that. The goal of the game
is there shouldn't be any win, right? Because it's like
in the real world: what's your definition of a win?"

Your interpretation could mean seeking out
dogfights until you carve out a legend as a
combat ace, but it could equally mean starting
up a junking and salvage business to make a few
credits. Chris wants every path to involve skill, with
mining, for instance, more a case of identifying
mineral seams and extracting them, rather than
floating near a rock and holding the spacebar.

So how will it all work? On a technical level,

their shipments. If that doesn't work, then you could
be looking at a bounty to bring back the troublesome
pirate lord's scalp. But fail to reverse the factory's
fortunes and the workers will start to be laid off,
crime rises and the area deteriorates visually, a
wearancHear system responding to local affluence.

Planetside scenarios are said to evolve equally
organically, with Chris's team of designers working
on modular mission templates so that the universe will
keep providing things to see and do long after its
scripted content is exhausted. And it is here that the
bamboozling scope finally begins to feel grounded.
Cloud Imperium may be crafting every ship by hand,
but it isn't trying to build a universe this densely
packed via raw manpower alone.

But such an emphasis on a bespoke, hand-
shaped approach has introduced limits. "It's not
necessarily as big as a procedural game like Elite or
No Mans Sky that's doing a lot more procedural
stuff, because there's a slightly different focus," says
Chris. "We're focused on a more crafted, detailed-
oriented approach. Even in what I’m describing,
there's still procedural stuff that goes on in building

CLOUD IMPERIUM ISN'T TRYING TO
BUILD A UNIVERSE THIS DENSELY
PACKED VIA RAW MANPOWER ALONE

the universe itself is designed to cater to hundreds of
thousands of players - and millions more NPCs, the
ratio being one human to nine Al characters — but
a game server can only contain 50 to 100 craft at
this level of graphical fidelity. Instead of dealing with
this via shards, space will be dynamically instanced,
those instances stacking on top of each other as
the player count in an area rises. Smartly, however,
whenever you drop out of warp, an algorithm will be
making decisions about who to stick you with based
on your in-game affiliations and reputation, and your
personal preferences. Express an interest in PvP and
you're likely to be matched with humans. Eschew
social contact and pirates in your instance will more
likely be Al bots. In this way, Star Citizen invisibly
tailors itself to you as much as your actions alter it.
And alter it you will, entangled as you are in
the web that is the economy simulation, which acts
to imbue the universe with consequence and create a
steady flow of missions. Chris provides the example
of a factory in need of raw goods. To start with, it
will post a mission to the job board that's for simple
haulage. Players get first dibs, but an NPC trucker
will step in as time passes. If the sector's lawless
enough to attract pirates, the factory may soon be cut
ОН and, as the bottom line is affected, the factory's
owner may then seek to hire mercenaries to protect

EDGE

elements of the cities, just because they're so big
and we're doing them in such high fidelity. Like, for
instance, if you're in a big city, the background city
blocks and everything is all much more procedural
versus an artist placing down each single building."

With all these promises to keep, is Chris feeling
the pressure of his literally invested fanbase? Well,
no. "The toughest person is myself on myself. The
person that would be most annoyed if | didn't do
what | have this vision in my head for is myself.
When | really see a game through, | have this picture
in my mind and l'm really obsessed about getting to
this point. The original Wing Commander was that
way, and that's where l'm at on this. l'm stubborn.”

What Chris asks of his fans now is the same
stubbornness: to bear with him while he, Erin and
the team realise his grand vision, piece by piece.
With so much riding on it — no more or less than the
reputation of crowdfunding whales = Star Citizen can
only either succeed spectacularly or fail disastrously.
No publisher would take this kind of risk, but a great
number of PC enthusiasts have, perhaps seeking
release from an industry driven by predictable cycles
and modest yearly iterations. Whatever Star Citizen
ends up being, it will shake the game industry, and
that alone makes it worth further exploration. Bl

TOP RIGHT The Gladiator is
a torpedo boat and space-
to-ground dive bomber
that can withstand a vast
amount of punishment.
FAR RIGHT Not all ships in
Star Citizen are military
single-seaters. Several
vessels require more than
one pair of hands, and can
be manned by a group of
friends or a hired NPC crew

RIGHT An Ironman mode

is planned for advanced
pilots, where death is final
and means restarting the
campaign. The persistent
universe has permadeath,
too, but only after you
amass critical injuries.
BELOW The Gladius is a
short-range patrol fighter,
once mass produced but
coming to the end of its
life. There are two variants:
stealth and a military spec
version with extra armour

ABOVE This powerplant is a modular
component. Damage might affect your
power needs, so reserve juice can help

EDGE

ABOVE The UEE Navy is the
symbol of human might in
the cosmos. Your service in
the campaign should earn
you a UEE citizenship.

LEFT Artists have to become
engineers for Star Citizen.
Every thruster is placed
due to real-world physical
principles, and there's no
room for cheating for

the sake of aesthetics

PLAYSTATION:
THE STORY BEHIND THE BRAND

p: 4 n
ТЕТТЕ
ЧЕРИ [а iim

КЕЛИШИ
аи.

BONY

Р
oar
рт
I
PETHTRTETHTETHTETHTETEST ME A ШШ
AEREN E E ite ^W

s i : H

шіт
LI

r
IE
uw

Lo e
Ey

9 012545.
т ` РРР

Two decades on тот its launch in Japan,
it's time to look at how Sony's first game
console transformed an industry

By SIMON PARKIN AND EDGE STAFF

лала 2

талағараа |Ж

Ф,

at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas,

In June 199]

Sony announced its first videogame console. The ‘Play Station’, as

the system was to be called, was a joint venture with Nintendo, a
power marriage that would carry both companies into the
emerging world of multimedia entertainment. The following day,
the marriage fell apart, with Nintendo declaring that it was
terminating its deal with Sony in order to partner with rival
manufacturer Philips. It was a public snub the like of which Sony
had not experienced before. The following month, the company's
president, Norio Ohga, called a meeting in Tokyo.

Ohga explained to his staff that a lawsuit and financial
recompense would not be enough to sate his appetite for revenge
against Nintendo. He rose to his feet. "We will never withdraw
trom this business," he declared to the room, which included
among its occupants Ken Kutaragi, an ex-Nintendo contractor who
had long harboured a desire to design a videogame console.

"Keep going," Ohga urged his staff.

In this sense, Sony's PlayStation, launched in Japan on December
3, 1994, was a console built upon a grudge. Without Nintendo's
duplicity, its unlikely that Sony's executives, already unsure of
whether the company should enter the videogame business, would
have funded the system. But while a desire for revenge was the
motivating factor at the beginning, this alone wouldn't have been
enough to launch a system that went on to sell 102 million units, or
to support a vision that did so much to define the 3D era of
videogames. How, then, did it happen?

THE PLAN

Ken Kutaragi, supported by Ohga,

drew together a team of engineers from
across Sony. A large part of the group
was comprised of people who had been
working on a 3D graphics engine
designed to augment live television
broadcasts with 3D images, a technology
dubbed System-G. Their expertise in

3D image processing would prove
invaluable to the console's design.

By June 1992, all relations with
Nintendo had been severed and Kutaragi
presented his work to Ohga and a small
number of other Sony executives. At the
meeting, Kutaragi told his bosses his plan
to create a proprietary CD-ROM-based
system that could render 3D graphics
specifically for playing videogames -
not multimedia. The rest of the board
opposed the idea.

When Ohga enquired as to what
kind of architecture such a machine
would require, Kutaragi reported a figure
of one million gate arrays, ten times the
number in any other Sony product at the
time. As Ohga reeled at the figure,
Kutaragi said, shrewdly: “Are you going
to sit back and accept what Nintendo
did to us?” Ohga replied: “There’s no
hope of making further progress with a
Nintendo-compatible 16bit machine.

Let’s chart our own course.”

PHIL HARRISON
FORMER PRESIDENT, SCE WORLDWIDE
STUDIOS; NOW A CORPORATE
VP AT MICROSOFT
Ken Kutaragi brought together a handful
of engineers that had come out of a
broadcast and professional realtime 3D
graphics engine called System-G.
Technologically, that's not really a million
miles away from videogames, but this was
a superhigh-end workstation. And Ken's
big vision was to take that, apply it in
high volume, and bring it into the home.
But there was a huge resistance inside
the company to actually being in the
videogames business at all. The main
reason why the Sony brand wasn't really
used in the early marketing of PlayStation
was not necessarily out of choice - it
was because Sony's old guard was

PLAYSTATION 20TH ANNIVERSARY

CLOCKWISE FROM ABOVE
RIGHT PlayStation
architect Ken Kutaragi;
Phil Harrison wields a
distinctive black PS1
game disc; the original
Sony console design

scared that it was going to destroy this
wonderful, venerable, 50-year-old brand.
They saw Nintendo and Sega as toys,
so why on Earth would they join the toy
business? That changed a bit atter we
delivered 90 per cent of the company's
profit for a few years.

CHRIS DEERING

FORMER PRESIDENT, SONY COMPUTER
ENTERTAINMENT EUROPE

PlayStation was special because Ken
Kutaragi and Ohga-san designed the
division as a pure play rather than a
product line of Sony's traditional hardware
division or the Sony Entertainment division.
It was a uniquely superior product,
allowed to grow from within with our own
culture. There were almost no politics
internally, and minimal politics with other
Sony companies.

Ken Kutaragi was the hardestworking
person in the company, and so passionate
that he would drive us to amazing heights
of achievement that we didn't believe
possible, even after the system came out.
| remember coming back from Tokyo
meetings and saying to the team: "You
won't believe this, but Ken told us to
double our sales targets even though
we don't have the manufacturing capacity
to deliver them." Kutaragi would then tell
the factories: "Europe wants twice as much
as their initial forecast. Are you going to
let them down?" It was brilliant. Without
the passion and the energy of the
Japanese HG, it just would not have
been possible to be so special.

MARTIN EDMONDSON
CO-CREATOR OF DESTRUCTION
DERBY AND DRIVER, AND

FOUNDER OF REFLECTIONS

We were lucky enough to be one of the
very few independent teams working on
the PlayStation hardware before it was
released, even before anyone really
knew anything about the system. The fact
that PlayStation doubled as a CD player
made it infinitely more publishertriendly
than the dreadful cartridge era that
preceded it. CDs were cheap to produce,
and you ordered exactly how many you
thought you wanted, but you could then
add more in double-quick time if sales
took off. It was perfect.

ED FRIES

FORMER VICE PRESIDENT OF CAME
PUBLISHING AT MICROSOFT, AND
CO-FOUNDER OF THE XBOX TEAM

In my opinion, the smartest move that Sony
made with its plan for the system was in its
decision to move away from cartridges to
CDs. It was far better for game creators
and publishers alike simply because CDs
were much faster and cheaper to
manufacture. That meant there was less
guessing about how many copies a title
might sell in advance and less risk of
being stuck with a warehouse full of
expensive returns.

PHIL HARRISON

It was a massive shift in the economics.
The working-capital requirement shifted
massively in favour of the developer and
publisher, and they could afford to put
more money into product development
and marketing, so it was a virtuous circle.

Even so, we had to work hard to
demonstrate our credibility, because
bringing hardware to market is one thing,
but being an organisation to market and
distribute and sell it is another. A lot of the
business questions related to what the
business model was for a publisher, what
the royalty rates would be, and how we'd
make and distribute the software. That was
set against the backdrop of the incumbent
business models of Sega and Nintendo,
which were at the time very restrictive.
They've changed now, but at the time,
publishing on 16bit Nintendo was an
expensive and risky proposition.

All the publishers we worked with in
Japan said that they loved the machine
and were all super-excited, but wondered
how they'd bring their software to market.
This was where the partnership between
Sony Corp and Sony Music really came
to fruition. Sony invited all the game
publishers and developers to a hotel in
Tokyo in 1994 and paraded on a stage
the 4O direct sales people it had in place
to distribute software. It said: "We know
this is a challenge for you, so we've gone
ahead and built our own sales force." The
net effect was that there were hundreds
and hundreds of thirdparty publishers in
Japan. Tons and tons of product being
developed for PlayStation — with the
resulting dynamic range of quality.

FROM TOP The very

first PS1 hardware
(albeit an empty shell)
to reach the Edge
office; Resident Evil
director Shinji Mikami
describes working with
PS1 for the first time
as being like given a
bigger canvas; Sony's
Teiyu Goto has been
responsible for the
product design of every
PlayStation to date

THE DESICN

Kutaragi's decision to create a system
that incorporated a CD drive was
significant. Now game makers could
include prerecorded soundtracks and
prerendered movies, creative flourishes
that would nudge the medium closer to
the Hollywood aesthetic, with all of the
cultural cachet that brought. This was
further aided by the shift in focus from
2D graphics to realtime 3D.

This wasn't, however, always the
plan. Former SCE producer Ryoji
Akagawa and chairman Shigeo
Maruyama claim that PlayStation was
originally designed as 2D-focused
hardware. It wasn't until the success of
Sega's 3D fighting game, Virtua Fighter,
in the arcade that they decided to design
PlayStation as a 3D-focused device.

There were other key decisions apart
from the choice of CPU and technological
clout that would affect the machine's
future. Fearing that Sony's board might
cancel Kutaragi's ambitious and unproven
concept, Ohga moved the designer and
his nine-member team to Sony Music, a
subsidiary of the company. The move was
significant: Sony Music understood the
importance of nurturing creative talent as
well as merely investing in technology,
along with the practical demands of
manufacturing vast quantities of CDs.

In this way, the ecosystem that would
support and nurture the PlayStation
platform through the years was set.

SHINJI MIKAMI

DIRECTOR, RESIDENT EVIL

Before the PlayStation, we could only
create characters and worlds in 2D, so
being able to use 3D polygons was a
giant leap. It let creators break free from
the shackles they were bound to, and
allowed them to be really creative in the
3D space. The new technology was like
giving an artist a bigger canvas, more
brushes, and more colours.

HIROAKI YOTORIYAMA

DIRECTOR, NAMCO'S SOUL BLADE
AND SOUL CALIBUR SERIES

Since PlayStation was the first console

to use 3D graphics, | was sure that it
would bring completely different ideas,
and different development and business
models, to games. At the same time, | was
excited to work as a game developer in
this great environment. | was proven right.
| joined the development team for the
PlayStation version of Tekken as a 3D
computer graphics animator. The
PlayStation generated new jobs in that
way — it was a huge change in game
development. 3D CG animation took a
more and more important role in game
development and | have to say | was very
lucky to be able to work as an animator
with such talented creators at that time.

YOSHINORI KITASE

DIRECTOR, CHRONO TRIGGER, FINAL
FANTASY VII AND FINAL FANTASY VIII
The PlayStation's high-specitication
graphics chip introduced new possibilities
to the medium. Likewise, with the high-
capacity CD medium we could
incorporate fullmotion video for the first
time. As such, the PlayStation put an
even greater emphasis on expression. |
originally studied filmmaking at university,
so | felt very lucky that | was now able to
put that knowledge to use in games.

SHINJI HASHIMOTO

PRODUCER, FINAL FANTASY AND
KINGDOM HEARTS SERIES

It was a time of major innovations, both
trom the development point of view and №

the business one. There was the transition
trom 2D to 3D graphics, from cartridges
to CD-ROM, and the introduction of CG
prerendering. PlayStation led the charge
with each of these innovations.

JEFF MINTER

FOUNDER, LLAMASOFT

The PlayStation was a very powertul
machine sold at a very reasonable price,
and had capabilities that opened up the
emerging trontier of polygonal 3D games
as opposed to sprites and tiles that had
been the norm up to that point. Most
importantly, it was easy to program,

and going for CDROM-based media
rather than mask ROMs meant less
overhead and therefore less risk for
developers, as the CD-based media
were a lot cheaper than carts.

MASAYA MATSUURA

CREATOR OF PARAPPA THE RAPPER
As a musician who was interested in
computer technology, | was incredibly
excited about extending the CD medium
beyond merely listening to music. It
seemed like something new and
revolutionary. As a result, my career path
switched from music over to games, and
that is where | have been for the past 20
years. In that respect, the PS1 had a
huge and profound impact on my life.

HIROAKI YOTORIYAMA

IF | put screenshots of both 3D and 2D
game visuals side by side, sometimes 2D
visuals still looked nicer than 3D ones.
Therefore, we needed to think in different
ways when we developed games with
3D visuals. We focused more on light,
atmosphere and the position of camera.
Of course, one of the toughest aspects of
game development at that time was
dealing with loading times during
gameplay. The length of loading time
depends heavily on where you put the
data on the disc, when you load the data,
and so on. | used a stopwatch to calculate
the loading time and brainstormed with
genius programmers every day to work
out how to minimise loading times.

COLIN ANDERSON
FORMER HEAD OF AUDIO AT DMA
DESIGN; NOW MD, DENKI

PLAYSTATION 20TH ANNIVERSARY

FROM TOP Though he
never got the chance

to create a PS1 title,
Jeff Minter was an early
fan of Sony's console;
Final Fantasy XV
director Hajime Tabata;
musician and Parappa
The Rapper creator
Masaya Matsuura

As someone whose number one passion
was, and still is, music, the PlayStation
provided a breath of fresh air for our
industry. It was the first console from a
company | felt really understood the
importance and potential of music as part
of the videogame experience. That's not to
diminish the incredible work composers
and engineers had done previously — my
favourite game music to this day is still all
chiptunes — but while chip music was the
norm, it was always going to be hard for
gaming to cross over into the mainstream.
Non-gamers didn't consider chip music to
be a legitimate form, and were never
going to think of gaming as anything other
than a novelty for kids while that remained
the case. PlayStation changed all that
because suddenly you were playing
games that contained the same music you
were hearing on the radio, or at a club.
It's hard to overstate how much of a shift
that made in the culture of gaming. For
that reason | certainly recognise ‘before
PlayStation’ and ‘after PlayStation’ as

two separate epochs.

THE UNVEILING

Sony was just one of several Japanese
electronics manufacturers to announce an
entry to the burgeoning console market
of the early ‘90s. It was an interesting
development, but memories of the US
videogame crash of the 1980s were still
fresh for many in the industry, and the
arrival of new players to the market
wasn’t always viewed optimistically.

Most of the media’s interest remained
focused on Nintendo and Sega, the
heavyweights of the industry, whose entire
business interest rested in videogames.
Consumers needed convincing that
Sony’s interest in, and commitment to,
videogames was serious — and more
importantly that the company and its
hardware had something new to offer.

YOZO SAKAGAMI

GAME DIRECTOR, RIDGE RACER
Several Japanese electronics
manufacturers, including Panasonic,
Fujitsu and Sony, all announced their

entry into the game console business at a
similar time. But since there were already
other game consoles by experienced
companies such as Sega and Nintendo
also coming to the market, people were
dubious about how PlayStation might
perform. It was a chaotic time, in that
sense. That said, after | saw the machine,
| personally believed that PlayStation could
bring a new kind of experience to 3D
racing games in particular.

HAJIME TABATA

DIRECTOR, FINAL FANTASY XV

| remember that when the system was
first shown, it filled both gamers and
developers with a new kind excitement.
The system showed us a new kind of
dream of what games could look and
play like. That's why, for many of us,
PlayStation is so special.

YOSHINORI KITASE

The film world had recently been rocked
by Jurassic Park in 1993, causing a
revolution in graphics. Soon afterwards, |
remember Sony revealed the PlayStation
tech demo that also used a FRex. It was
an incredible moment that foreshadowed
a similar revolution in the world of games.

JASON BROOKES

FORMER EDITOR, EDGE

During the awkward migration from 16bit
to 32bit, news started to emanate from
Japan about a new Sony 32bit machine.
Remember, this was a time when there
was really no gaming media beyond
print magazines; the Internet — including
email — hadn't been adopted yet in most
tacets of UK lite. So hot gaming rumours
or news trom Japan — something |
probably valued more highly than nutrition
or sleep at that time — had to be
translated, typed up and sent on a fax by
our newly hired correspondent, Nicolas di
Costanzo, a stroppy Frenchman living in
Tokyo teaching English, who was to
develop a remarkable knack for
schmoozing Japanese game execs.

Back then, | was obsessive about
console tech specs and the benchmarks
by which new systems were becoming
judged - the arbitrary ‘polygons per
second’ in particular. So | was ecstatic
when, in the thick of issue six's deadline, >

“The system was
extremely easy to work
with and try ideas out on.
It was the first time we
had easy access to fully
hardware-accelerated 3D.
Bear in mind that back
then 3D was all pretty
much software rendered
— even on PC you didn't
really see the first wave of
3DFX cards for another
two years. Combined with
CD storage, suddenly you
were no longer restricted
to trying to cram a game
onto a floppy or cartridge,
so you really did have a
world of opportunities
to explore. It was a
really liberating system
to work on, and I think
that's why it allowed
so many new and
memorable experiences
to be created."

Steve Lycett
Sumo Digital

PlayStation

01—03 The base hardware and controller moved through numerous variations before settling on their iconic
shapes. 04 The Memory Card - an essential buy, alongside a second joypad. 05 The official Multitap addon

we received a faxed list of impressive
specs for Sony's upcoming 32bit 'PSX' – a
list Nicolas had typed up from the Nihon
Shimbun newspaper. We immediately
cleared two pages for a news story and in
the same issue devoted space to Sega's
Satum specs, which had also just been
revealed. Ridge Racer, a dazzling new
3D coin-op from Namco, had taken the
cover spot of that issue, as a harbinger

of exciting things to come.

MARTIN EDMONDSON

Watching that initial realtime FRex demo
just blew me away, and | remember
buzzing with possibilities for games right
at that moment. Destruction Derby was a
game l'd wanted to make for a while
since | loved going to watch derbies as
a kid, but until PlayStation, no hardware
had existed that could really do it justice.
Getting the chance to present a fully
tleshed game design to Psygnosis was
both exciting and nerve-wracking at the
same time, since the dev kits were so rare.
Securing the kits was one of the most
exciting times | can remember.

When we got the kits into the office,
it was just so easy to program. Within an
hour or so of receiving the dev kit our lead
programmer Mike Troughton had polygons
spinning on the screen, and in less than
seven days we had the fully textured car
driving in a circle — on rails, to be fair —
around a makeshift oval track.

But for me personally it was the fact
that for the first time, smooth, detailed and
realistic 3D was easily achievable. This in
itself transformed games, producing a
complete step change from 2D to 3D,
bringing in far more believable and
immersive experiences. Once PlayStation
arrived, nothing looked the same again.

JAKE KAZDAL

ARTIST, REZ AND SPACE CHANNEL 5;
CO-FOUNDER OF 17-BIT

| had just quit my job as a gameplay
counsellor at Enix America, and was
saving cash to go back to college. |
was working my tail off in a dark, cold
warehouse, keeping myself warm with
thoughts of my soon-to-be-held PlayStation.
Edge had a bunch of previews of all
the upcoming 3D game insanity, and

it kept me going through those dark,

Textured cubes and
fast-moving, Gouraud-
shaded circles were
nifty enough as initial
PS1 demos, but it was
Sony's T-Rex that made
the deepest impression
among developers who
got to see PS1 in the
run up to its launch

The first Edge cover
to feature a PlayStation
was 1994's issue 11,
when Sony's console
was still known as PS-X

rainy Seattle days. It just seemed like
the future, the arcade come home.

JENS MATTHIES

CREATIVE DIRECTOR, MACHINECAMES
| was still at school when the PlayStation
was announced, suffering through my
final school years, trying to figure out
what to do with my life. But | distinctly
remember viewing the machine with a
mixture of shock and disbelief. "Sony is
making a videogame machine? Sony
makes CD players, not videogame
consoles." Then it was: “It's how fast?"

COLIN ANDERSON

| was DMA Design's audio engineer when
the PlayStation launched at the tail end of
1994 and about to become part of
Nintendo's 'Dream Team' of developers for
their Ultra 64 project. I'd not long finished
the music and sound effects for DMA’s first
Super Nintendo title, Uniracers, and had
started work on the [eventually unreleased]
SNES title Kid Kirby. | don't remember
paying that much attention to the
PlayStation launch. Not because | was
firmly committed to the Nintendo camp

or anything, but because there were so
many companies launching games
consoles around that time that it was hard
to get excited about one that wasn't from
Nintendo or Sega. | mean, we'd just been
through the 3DO and Amiga CD32
debacles at the time, so a console with
3D graphics and a CD drive wasn't
exactly news, even though it was from
Sony. They were still a completely
unproven name in the games industry,
much as Microsoft were a generation later.

PHIL HARRISON

| remember thinking, 'Oh my God, the
name is bombing and everyone is going
to hate it.' | shared the information with
Tokunakarsan [president of SCEI] and he
said: "Oh, that's nothing. You should have
heard what people said about Walkman."

THE LAUNCH

PlayStation launched in Japan on
December 3, 1994, for ¥39,800, nine
months before it arrived in the US and
Europe. All 100,000 launch units sold
out, with another 200,000 shifted in the
subsequent 30 days. In short, it was a
triumph, one aided by a strong lineup
of launch software, led by Namco's
storming port of its arcade title Ridge
Racer, and driven by the comparatively
low price of the system's games.

SHUHEI YOSHIDA
PRESIDENT OF WORLDWIDE STUDIOS,
SONY COMPUTER ENTERTAINMENT
On the morning of December 3, 1994,
the day of the original PlayStation
console’s launch in Japan, | was standing
outside Yodobashi Camera store in
Shinjuku, watching people purchasing the
brand-new PlayStation console with a
couple of launch titles, including Ridge
Racer and Parodius. It seemed like every
person lining up at the store was there to
purchase a PlayStation, and everyone
had a big smile on their face when they
walked out the large electronics store
with a console in their hands.

| think we had shipped about 100k

units to retailers for the launch, and all the

PLAYSTATION 20TH ANNIVERSARY

stock was gone in the first week or so. It
was a great launch — people were so
excited about the arcadequality 3D
graphics and CD-quality sound of
PlayStation games, especially Ridge
Racer, which showed off the 3D
realtime graphics technology.

HIROAKI YOTORIYAMA

| was one of the first consumers to buy

a PlayStation. Perhaps the greatest Teruo ‘Terry’ Tokunaka,

diff ih | беа the first president
|Тегепсе was the price of software of Sony Computer

PlayStation games were about half the Entertainment

Incorporated, oversaw

price of those that came before. | was a Коныр

hardcore gamer and | spent most of my
salary buying every single game released
at that time. At that time | was so eager to
experience every different idea, concept
and design in every game.

JASON BROOKES

Because of Sony's tight control over its
wholesale distribution chain, very few
early units actually made it to the UK or
other countries — in fact, Sony forbid the
exporting of any units. Those few that did
make it through were mostly purchased at
retail — one per customer - for a little
under Ұ40,000- £245 at that time. No
surprise that on arrival in the UK this was
initially hiked upwards of £800 by
console 'grey import retailers eager to
hook up desperate early adopters.

JAKE KAZDAL

| actually flew to Tokyo for the launch, and
they were totally sold out. Supersenior

Enix Japan man Futami-san toured me Compared to its main

: ; competitor at the time,
around the Enix Japan offices, then told Sega's Saturn, the PS1
me of a wicked little underground shop architecture was a

| M "e del of el .K
deep in Shinjuku that would definitely 2

have опе, and they did! | have а picture so-called Geometry

ес ; Transformation Engine
somewhere of me kissing my PlayStation WIDTH
box while it was still on the palette.

ED FRIES

| was still managing the Microsoft Word
development team when the original
PlayStation launched, playing games in
my free time and hoping to get back into
the game industry. Just over a year later, |
was running Microsoft's fledgling PC game
publishing business. At first, PlayStation
seemed like a potential ally. For example,
in sports, both Microsoft and Sony were
competing against EA. So | met with [Sony

Imagesoft's] Kelly Flock and we discussed
teaming up to take EA on. Nothing came
of it. | also met with [Verant's] John
Smedley and for a while it looked like
we were going to publish EverQuest, but
that also didn't happen. Then later, of
course, we became competitors when
Microsoft launched Xbox in 2001.

CHRIS DEERING

Alter the Japanese launch, Tokyo thought
we should launch initially only in UK,
France and Germany. But by our launch
on September 9, 1995, we were on the
ground in 15 markets. What | most
enjoyed was our annual conferences
when we would share war stories and
hunt for weak spots in the competition.
My other most favourite thing was to nail

بوا

Gob

exclusives for PlayStation, especially family
tranchises like Disney movies. | knew trom
the movie business that lead titles drive a
company's momentum, enthusiasm and
sense of pride, not to mention a significant
point of leverage to secure retailer support
in display and promotion. Watching

these theories come to life and bear fruit
was an amazing high.

THE GAMES

The PlayStation software library remains
one of the most diverse and interesting
of any videogame system. From
Squaresoft's ever-bolder clutch of
Japanese roleplaying games to Namco's

first-rate arcade conversions, Capcom's
blossoming survival-horror series,
Konami's rhythm-action games and
Polyphony's simulation racers through
to unusual curios such as Ape Escape,
PaRappa The Rapper, The Book Of
Watermarks and Jumping Flash, it's

an enviable and historic lineup.

PHIL HARRISON

The team at Namco had created the
port of Ridge Racer trom the coin-op
remarkably quickly. | remember realising
that was going to be pivotal piece of
software for the west in particular.

YOZO SAKAGAMI

Ridge Racer was first developed as an
arcade game with [proprietary Namco
coin-op architecture] System 22, which
was very powerful. Moreover, people
could play Ridge Racer in the arcade via
a huge arcade cobinet, with a steering
wheel and a gas pedal, so it was the big
challenge for the console game in terms
of how we could make it enjoyable to
play using the PlayStation controller.

YOSHINORI KITASE

| was working as the co-director on
Chrono Trigger for the Super Famicom
when the PlayStation was launched. We
had just started the final debugging stage
of development, and the team was
incredibly tired. Nevertheless, | remember
our development team playing Ridge
Facer night after night.

YOZO SAKAGAMI

| joined the team as a visual art leader
at the beginning and ended up somehow
as director of the game. Our team was
relatively small — we had only three
programmers and four visual designers,
with only one PC debug station, which
was called ‘COW’ among our team
because the design of the PC itselt
looked like a cow.
Since PlayStation was a new
console at that time, the debug process
had to be managed by the programmer,
and | needed to be in charge of not only
visual art but also some parts of game
tlow, game design and so on. As a
result, | became director on the game.
During the development of Ridge =

“Т remember everyone
being instantly won over
by what they saw and
heard on the day when
our first PlayStation
arrived from Japan,
mostly upon seeing
Ridge Racer in action,

of course: a state-of-the-
art coin-op adaption that
loaded in about ten
seconds while a pixel-
perfect — and playable —
wave of Galaxians
swarmed down the
screen. That was really

a stroke of genius, I
thought — such a smart
juxtaposition of gaming’s
past and future.”

Jason Brookes
Former Edge editor

ave

[үн i ee

01 Ridge Racer (Namco, 1994). 02 Tekken (Namco, 1995). 03 Battle Arena Toshinden
(Takara, 1995). 04 Jumping Flash (SCE, 1995). 05 Destruction Derby (Psygnosis, 1995)

06 Wipeout (Psygnosis, 1995). 07 Tomb Raider (Eidos Interactive, 1996). 08 Resident
Evil (Capcom, 1996). 09 Gran Turismo (SCE, 1997). 10 Metal Gear Solid (Konami, 1998)

Racer we needed to work on everything
from scratch, thinking about how we
convert the visual data, how we could
adjust each colour between the two
versions, and so on. l'm pretty sure we
requested lots of support from SCE,
since it was a really early stage of PS |
game development, but finding my own
way to develop the game from scratch
was the one of the best experiences |
had during that time, and ultimately we
enjoyed the challenges.

JASON BROOKES
The first PlayStation we received at Edge
was actually just an empty plastic display
unit reluctantly supplied by SCE London for
issue 17's cover photoshoot. It wasn't until
a Fedex box arrived from Nicolas, just
prior to deadline, that we finally got our
hands on the thing = which of course
attracted a big audience of gawkers from
neighbouring Future magazines as we
unboxed it and plugged it into a big new
telly specially bought for the occasion.
People trom other departments always
swamped the office when new hardware
arrived, but there had never been this
amount of interest, and it was mostly down
to how convincing Ridge Racer was in
showing off what the PlayStation could do.
Of course, the initial launch wave of
titles — partly a mixed bag of shooters and
mah jong games, if | remember correctly =
was just the beginning, and we'd only got
a vague sense of what an astonishing
impact the console would have upon the
gaming world — even new gaming genres.
We hadn't played the superlative Tekken,
we knew nothing of Gran Turismo, or even
FFVII, Resident Evil, Tomb Raider and
Metal Gear Solid — all hugely original and
genre-detining titles that the platform would
give birth to over the next few years.

YOZO SAKAGAMI

Loading times proved to be one of the
biggest challenges for game development
on PlayStation, because it was still natural
for people to play games without loading
pauses at that time. Even though they
could get used to loading while playing
games, we wanted them to be able to
play Ridge Racer as if there was no
loading time. Of course, it was impossible
to completely remove loading time, but we

PLAYSTATION 20TH ANNIVERSARY

The original PS1 joypad
didn't feature analogue
sticks, but Namco's
NeGcon, released in
1995, brought analogue
steering to driving titles
such as Ridge Racer

FROM TOP Hideo Kojima
and Kazunori Yamauchi
had successful design
careers prior to PS1,
but the MGS and GT
series saw them move
into different gears

Ridge Racer was already
on our radar as early as
issue six – albeit in the
shape of the original
Namco arcade machine

brainstormed and decided to load all the
data while showing the PlayStation and
publisher logo, which allowed users to
directly start the game without any stress.
On the other hand, in order to
implement this process, it was necessary
to limit the total amount of program and
visual data we used, and we focused
especially on texture data, putting limits
on colours and the size of each texture.
We believed that beautiful graphics were
important, but providing comfortable
game flow had to be a higher priority.

STEVE LYCETT

EXECUTIVE PRODUCER, SUMO DICITAL
At the time of the PlayStation's launch, a
bunch of game stores had sprung up
around the Super Nintendo grey import
scene in Sheffield. One day | wandered
into one of these having just played on the
ful-scale Ridge Racer at the local Namco
Wonderpark, and there was a crowd
gathered around a PlayStation running the
very same game. lt was pretty mind-
blowing to see a console as powerful as
a full-on dedicated arcade system,
especially as 3D was only really starting
to take hold at that point in arcades.

Later, | remember being at DICE when
we were working on [racing game]
Motorhead. Gran Turismo had just been
released. All the guys were sat in the room
looking at the replay feature and were
just amazed at what they were seeing.

It really felt like every new release back
then just kept pushing boundaries, and

that developers around the world were

pushing to outdo each other.

NAOKI YOSHIDA
PRODUCER/DIRECTOR, FINAL
FANTASY XIV: A REALM REBORN
The first PlayStation came out just before
| entered the games industry, but | can
certainly remember going all out playing
the time attack mode on the original
Ridge Racer. | spent so much time dritting
around the tracks in Time Trial mode that |
ended up breaking the controller. Even
now, | feel it was such a brilliant title that
skirted the borderline between games and
reality. | also enjoyed the Final Fantasy
titles on PST, and I'm highly honoured
to be able to work on the series today.
One of the wondertul things about

the system was how there were so many
different types of game released, with
wildly different design ideas. Even now, |
feel totally blown away by and unable to
compete with the game and character
designs in Devil Dice.

CLIFF BLESZINSKI

FORMERLY OF EPIC GAMES; NOW
OF BOSS KEY PRODUCTIONS

The PlayStation singlehandedly reignited
my love of consoles. Games like Battle
Arena Toshinden and Warhawk might
have the most mindshare for memories,
but my favourite was Jumping Flash. It's
a game that still inspires me.

ADAM SALTSMAN

CREATOR OF CANABALT
| can count on one hand the number of
videogames that | was obsessed with
before the PlayStation arrived. On just the
first PlayStation | had similar obsessive
experiences with Final Fantasy VII,
Warhawk, Tenchu, Metal Gear Solid,
Crash Bandicoot, Jet Moto, Final Fantasy
Tactics, Tomb Raider, Castlevania:
Symphony Of The Night, Time Crisis,
Iwisted Metal 2... and l'm probably
missing a couple of others. | played so
much that | had to tip the PlayStation
upside down and keep the lid off and a
set of screwdrivers handy to adjust the
bias on the laser just to get the games
to work after a while. It made a massive
and permanent impression on me.

| can perfectly remember the first time
| entered ће Cistern level in the first Tomb
Raider. It is impossible to say why, but that
just made a huge impression on me. |
remember a single afternoon where | ‘got’
Tenchu and breezed through five or six
levels in one go, as if | was іп a trance,
and unconsciously spending the next day
at school peeking around corners to see if
there were guards down near the gym.
And | remember playing Metal Gear
Solid and thinking, ‘This is it — this is the
tuture of games’. For once, | was right.

SHINJI MIKAMI

It was the first system that allowed me to
make a game with 3D polygons, so |
remember everything being totally new.
We had to learn everything from zero, so
it wasn't easy, but at the same time my №

hopes were high. Fortunately, Resident
Evil was well received, and the hard
work paid off.

MARTIN EDMONDSON

Prior to PlayStation, we'd had some

hits like Shadow Of The Beast, but they
were limited in their appeal, and sold to
a pretty hardcore Amiga-owning gamer.
Destruction Derby and Driver were

successful on a whole other level, reaching

a more massmarket audience that Sony
had created with the PlayStation. It
certainly got us noticed. GT Interactive
bought Reflections towards the end of
development on Driver, so that game
was life-changing in that respect.

THE COMPETITION

Competition for domination of the console

market was never as fierce as it was
during the mid- 1990s. Nintendo 64 and
the 32bit Sega Saturn vied for consumer
attention alongside upstarts such as
Sony's offering and 3DO, Fujitsu's FM
Towns Marty, Apple's Pippin, NEC's

PC-FX, and Atari’s Jaguar, its final attempt

to recreate the success of its VCS/2600.

It was a time of unprecedented choice for
videogame consumers and, for failures in
the market, a time of unprecedented loss.

TRIP HAWKINS

FOUNDER, THE 3DO COMPANY

At the time of the PlayStation launch |

was waiting at 3DO, wondering what

the Japanese price would be. We were
struggling to get 3DO sales at $499, but
Sony did pretty well in Japan and then

of course stunned everyone when they
launched at $299 the next year in the US.

PHIL HARRISON

At ЕЗ in 1995 [Sony Interactive
Entertainment president] Olaf Olafsson
was doing the spiel about growth in the
industry and droning on = it was
deliberately staged that way. | can't
remember a single thing about his
presentation, but he did say that he'd like
to bring on stage the president of Sony
Computer Entertainment America to

PLAYSTATION 20TH ANNIVERSARY

The 3DO hardware
launched by Trip
Hawkins (above) was
set to get an upgrade
via the proposed M2
module, giving it PS1-
rivalling power (top),
but the success of
Sony's console put paid
to long-term viability
for the platform

s
зро

share with everyone an important piece
of information. Steve Race went up to the
microphone, just said, "299", and sat
back down again. [Sega had just
announced a retail price of $399 for

its Saturn console.] The room erupted.

TRIP HAWKINS

| was at the E3 conference in 1995
when the US launch price of $299 was
announced from the stage. Howard
Lincoln of Nintendo was also on stage
and immediately mocked what he saw as
a moneyosing proposition by saying, “|

hope your shareholders like that". But what

it demonstrated was Sony's compelling
commitment to longterm success. They
knew that the manufacturing costs of
CD-ROM drives and RAM would come
down a lot within a year. They put an
enormous bet on the table, but their
intelligence matched the swagger.

GEOFF GLENDENNING

FORMER HEAD OF MARKETING, SONY
COMPUTER ENTERTAINMENT EUROPE
Sega's Saturn launched six months ahead

of the PlayStation. Their advertising
campaign = gritty and edgy = was
amazing, whereas our mainstream ads
were quite young and childish. They had
a pretty similar lineup of games, the
technology was similar, and they were far
better known to consumers. And yet when
we came to Easter in 1996, when we
dropped the PlayStation's price to £199,
it all changed. Sega's head of marketing
had called me up and said, "We're not
scared — you all look scared, and as
you're running away, we're going to
chase you out of town with a baseball
bat." That Easter, PlayStation outsold the
Saturn by eightand-a-half to one. They
never recovered from that. From that point
onwards, they started to be delisted

from the high street retailers.

JEFF MINTER

When the PlayStation launched | was in
the midst of moving to California to go
and work for Atari. Personally speaking,
it had a pretty negative effect, as the
system ended up being much more
popular and better than the Atari Jaguar
and likely precipitated the end for Atari,
thereby putting me out of a job! But the
end of one job led to another, and just
like everyone else | still loved playing
the PlayStation regardless.

JASON BROOKES

Those early days of Edge were all about
transition. It was a time when 1 Obit
computers = Amiga/ST = and consoles —
SNES/Mega Drive — were duking it out
for market share, the PC was also starting
fo turn heads as a games machine, and
the newly arrived 3DO and Atari Jaguar
were jostling for a head start on the
coming ‘next generation’. But these latter
systems quickly fell short of convincing
gamers and developers - 3DO was way
too expensive, and the Jaguar seemed
underpowered. Most notably, many
‘nextgen’ games were cursed with barely
interactive FMV or were just poorly
designed western action games. As a
result, we found ourselves in a moral
dilemma, between encouraging readers
to support the fledgling systems while
cautioning them to hold out in case
something better came along. The
uncomfortable truth we felt so palpably

back then was that the next generation
could – and should - be so much better.

DOUG BONE

FORMER GAMES MANAGER, НМУ;
NOW GENERAL MANAGER, UK &
DIGITAL, SQUARE ENIX

| was working at HMV's Liverpool
branch, at a time when the 'hot new
consoles' were the Atari Jaguar and the

3DO. Both had generated a lot of interest,

but there's no doubt it was Sega's Saturn
and Sony's PlayStation that were
generating the most excitement. We'd
followed their Japanese launches — mainly
via Edge — and everybody was pumped
about the opportunities from the new
hardware and the delivery of, finally, true
‘arcade perfect" experiences at home.
These machines were going to do
everything we'd always wanted and in
the case of PlayStation, having a brand
that was cool in its own right — not just to
gamers — meant that everybody else was
starting to take an interest, too.

JAKE KAZDAL

| brought my new Japanese PlayStation

to my friend's game studio, Lobotomy,

in Seattle. They had a 70" TV with a
bunch of other systems hooked up to it.
The whole company came down to the
break room to check out my new toy,

and as we played our first game of Ridge
Racer on this massive TV, | remember my
friend Kevin Chung just screaming out:
"DUDE, 3DO IS SO DEAD!" Classic.

JASON BROOKES
In Sony's offices, after signing a bunch of
NDAs, we were granted time with a PS-X
dev kit, a prototype controller and the
infamous animated dinosaur that we'd
already printed a screenshot of in the
magazine. It was jaw-droppingly
impressive compared to any 3D graphics
we'd seen running on a home system, and
we also got to experience some other
realtime demos of the graphics and sound
capabilities, which also embodied the
mantra that SCE Japan would later tout:
"If it's not realtime, it's not a game".
Atterwards, on the train home, dazed
by the beauty of the visuals we'd seen, |
remember us salivating at the possibilities
of 30fps, realtime, textured worlds, and

SCE man Geoff
Glendenning (above)
helped to take PS1
to war with Sega's
Saturn (below). It
didn't take long for
a victor to emerge

With Star Wars and
Zelda titles in the
works, it was impossible
to ignore ‘Ultra 64’,
Nintendo's response

to Sony's ambitions

feeling pretty special that we were the
only UK journalists we knew of who had
somehow been admitted to Sony's secret
club. Of course, the bittersweet reality was
that we weren't allowed to reveal a thing
in the magazine.

With hindsight, that meeting was
quite a shrewd move by Phil Harrison,
even if it wasn't intentional. From that
moment onwards, our faith in the current
‘nextgen’ console establishment waned
fast. With Nintendo's nextgen plans still
unknown, we felt even more assured that
the real next generation was to be a two:
horse race between Sega and Sony. As if
to hasten this, a cynical, no-punches-pulled
3DO article was run in Edge issue ten,
suggesting on the cover that it might be
‘'3DOA’ for poor old Trip Hawkins and
his nextgen ambitions. To this day, | still
teel bad about that cover.

THE MARKETING

In every territory, Sony’s marketing of its
PlayStation was unlike anything that had
come before. This was a new system,
carrying a new message with the promise
of a new way of doing things. Nowhere
was that clearer than in the UK and
Europe, where, aided by games such as
Wipeout, the PlayStation name became
synonymous with club culture and the
underground. This was a console with

a cultural cachet that no videogame
system had enjoyed before.

GLEN O'CONNELL

FORMER HEAD OF UK PR AT
WIPEOUT PUBLISHER PSYGNOSIS
PlayStation spoke to and engaged
with gameplayers as people and offered
things that retlected their own personal
interests; it didn't talk down to them as
children. It also had games that looked
and sounded like nothing that had
come before. PlayStation helped open
up the industry to delivering content
that was as credible as any other
entertainment form.

As well as the work the Psygnosis
team and its titles did to support the
launch of PlayStation, there were also
some incredibly smart and talented
people working for PlayStation UK, such
as Geoff Glendenning, who really helped
push PlayStation out there in an edgy way
that smashed down many barriers for the
whole industry. If you look back at the
SAPS [Society Against PlayStation]
advertising campaign they were asked to
launch with compared to what this new,
smart and credible teen and 20-something
audience who bought into PlayStation
was demanding, the innovative guerrilla
work Geoff spearheaded in the UK
definitely touched the passions of these
opinion formers like never before. Without
their energy and desire, PlayStation may
have just been another games console
with good sales that appealed to core
gamers, rather than becoming one of
the world's most successful brands,
which it remains today.

GEOFF GLENDENNING

The interesting thing was that a brief had
been put out to the European agency
saying that the position of the PlayStation
globally was ten- to 14-year-old boys. It
was very much following the Sega and
Nintendo business model. But | didn't think
the market could sustain three major
players in the console market. | mean, the
record for the most number of installed
consoles in the UK was held by the SNES,
and they'd sold | think two-and-a-half
million. That was the market saturation
point in those days.

It all coincided with the rise of club
culture. You had this massive movement of
underground that was becoming kind of
mainstream in the mid- 905, around the №

time of the launch of PlayStation. It also
coincided with a media explosion of
lifestyle magazines to report on the
subculture. | began to write a topline
document in my spare time called
‘Credibility for PlayStation’, which was
arguing that perhaps we should be
launching PlayStation not to ten- to
| 4-yearolds, but actually, keeping in
mind the 32bit technology and the jump
in games quality, to get on the top of the
piles of influencers and opinion formers,
to actually drive quite an older brand
position. | proposed that we should be
looking at an 1840-35 age group, to
go for that position because that's what
the kids aspire to.

| printed this document and put it
in everybody's pigeonholes, and it's
something that we as a team adopted.
We felt we could create word of mouth
in the underground and build this essential
sense of credibility. The build-up to the
'95 launch was very much in the early
day of identifying, connecting with, and
building an army of ambassadors within
youth culture. It coincided with the spread
of club culture out of the UK. | don't think it
would be replicable. It was almost entirely
part of the zeitgeist. And we were able to
get away with it because Chris Deering,
as president, had such global respect.
The Japanese pretty much let us, Europe
or EMEA, get on with it.

CHRIS DEERING

| think that our marketing in Europe

was really special, employing tactics
from the music industry in reaching
audiences in many personal ways and
not just with big TV budgets. We did

a lot of Red Bulltype sponsorships of
skateboard and snowboard events. |
believe that SCEE was extra special
because we hired very young, very
passionate people who just wanted to
make a difference. We had no stock
options in the beginning, and our pay
scales were low, but we made it a

fun place to work. Even as late as seven
years into the life of SCEE, our average
employee age was 25. So, as you can
imagine, a great deal of our really coolest
strategies and tactics were dreamed

up at office parties, birthdays and any
other excuse for a piss-up.

PLAYSTATION 20TH ANNIVERSARY

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP
Psygnosis's Nick
Burcombe and Nicky
Carus-Westcott prepare
for the launch of
Wipeout in 1995; the
dedicated PS1 area

at Ministry Of Sound;
official Wipeout garb

I CONSIDER ITA
ТЕЛІ! ІЗ
ПІШІП:
PLOYIOG THE PAAT OF
THE PITATE.

ig.

Ж F

Ww
““

Sony's US division
didn't quite get with
the programme at first,
coming up with the
awful, much-derided
‘Polygon Man’ mascot

GEOFF GLENDENNING

| was a real pitbull terrier then, always
going out to rock the boat. | had a vision,
which wasn't about spending shitloads in
a traditional way on mass media. Because
we had the NTSC machine for almost a
year before the European launch, we had
a year to seed credibility. And one thing in
the early part of '95 that gave me such
confidence was presenting to people
that'd come into the office from magazines
like The Face, iD, or obscure underground
magazines which had readerships of
maybe 5,000. I'd say, "Do you like
videogames?" And they'd go, “No, we
hate them." I'd say, "OK, that's fine — just
have a look at this and see what you
think." And without exception, every single
person walked out going, "All right, this is
fucking amazing." People were actually
printing just a series of screenshots in their
magazines because Battle Arena Toshiden
looked so amazing. Nobody had ever
seen anything like it before.

CHRIS DEERING

| remember in 2001, our Belgian team
had a giant PlayStation party on a
Saturday night in a huge indoor bicycle-

racing arena in Ghent to celebrate some
sales milestone. When they told me that
they were importing a DJ from Japan and
were expecting 3,000 people, |
panicked, thinking that they were blowing
their marketing budget on an indulgent
frivolity. But the Belgian team had a
different plan. They partnered with a radio
station to push the event as the place to be
seen, and actually charged consumers

*€ 30 each to attend the event. SCEE
Belgium turned a profit. The party was due
to end at 3am, but actually continued until
8am on Sunday morning. | took the train
over to see it, and it was amazing.
Another fantastic memory involves a similar
type of party in Zurich that was held in an
abandoned jail, and another in Barcelona
in an indoor bullfighting arena. We
wanted to have fun, and for our fans to
have fun. They responded. PlayStation
was not just a product, it was a culture.
For many, it remains one today.

LEE CARUS

ARTIST, WIPEOUT; CO-FOUNDER,
FIRESPRITE GAMES

I'll never forget getting invited to our little
superclub here in Liverpool, Cream, for a
night that the brilliant Sue in marketing had
put on for some competition winners. |
thought, ‘Free night out at Cream — what's
not to like?’ Being local and into that
scene, l'd been to Cream many times, but
this time was different. | was ushered past
the queues waiting to get in and straight
into the VIP section. | remember thinking to
myselt, ‘This is odd’. While marketing did
have these VIP tickets, the club is massive,
so it was filled with the usual crowd, and
as usual | was keen to get in among them.

When | got down to the floor, | was
blown away. | looked up and saw that the
massive projection screens that normally
displayed Chemical Brothers or Orbital
videos were showing footage trom
Wipeout. As | walked on, | noticed the
clubbers taking time out to play the game
on pods that Sue had installed. But it
didn't feel weird, it didn't seem out of
place - it looked right! It felt right!

Later on, Sue came rushing over to me
with this guy who won a competition in
France to be at the Cream Wipeout event.
She introduced me as a member of the
dev team, and his eyes lit up. He b

Play*ration

“ТЕ was very much

about generating word
of mouth from the
underground. I actually
had a small team
in-house. I felt it
essential not to be a
faceless corporation. For
example, we were next
door to Sony Music, and
I wanted to go and meet
the team there. I was told:
‘No, no, you have to wait
to be introduced, Well,

bollocks to that. So Tjust | mr ыи reines
got a massive stack of 222 1 v— плот Garner 10
games and just went floor РЫ. да сады а

to floor and met every

record label, every 06 07 08

marketing guy, and built
relationships there.
When we launched, we
gave free PlayStations
to all of the important
Sony Music artists."

Geoff Glendenning
Former head of marketing, SCEE

=
©
in %
E
c
rr]
e
c
о
m

01—02 With PS1, Psygnosis transformed its
image from purveyor of fantasy-themed
computer games to the home of Wipeout.
03 Ministry Of Sound was one of many Sony ys efe
partners in clubland. 04-05 The Wipeout Wel
game and music album. 06 A PlayStation/ ь than
The Face crossover. 07-08 The Chemical | а І
Brothers and Orbital, stars of Wipeout's
soundtrack. 09 The infamous perforated PS1
flyer. 10 An early focus on the PS symbols.
11 PS1's first UK TV ad, featuring 'SAPS'

fumbled around and pulled out a camera
and thrust it into Sue's hand, saying, "Take
a picture, take a picture!" | must have had
the most confused look on my face when
he developed the film.

That night, | realised that Wipeout
might be quite popular, but more
importantly that this litle grey box called
PlayStation might be massive.

GEOFF GLENDENNING

We ended up installing PlayStation rooms
in 52 nightclubs across the UK. We gave
them kit and tree games regularly, and
they built their own special rooms. And
"уе a document somewhere that shows all
the photographs of every different room —
every room was different. We didn't do
every club, we just supported the top club
in every town, so it became cool for them
to identify that they had PlayStation. It
ended up that they'd put our logo on their
flyers as well. Fitty-two clubs were putting
our logo on every flyer they distributed.
We had more than ten million flyers a
month going out across the UK with our
logo on them, for free. We had visuals
playing in every club because | did these
mixed visuals tapes. We were sponsoring
Tribal Gathering and Big Love. We pretty
much owned club culture.

THE SALES

PlayStation's relatively low pricing gave
the console the early boost it needed

to take root in the Japanese market.
Within a month, the console had sold
out its 300,000-unit allocation. While
Sony lost a considerable amount of
money on each console sold until the
end of 1995, the fact that the machine
was ¥5,000 cheaper than Sega's Saturn
was crucial. By March 2007, Sony had
sold 102 million PlayStation systems
into homes across the world.

YOSHINORI KITASE

Because the games were sold on
CD-ROMs, music shops and convenience
stores suddenly started to sell games in
Japan. Before that, people could only buy
games in dedicated game stores. | was

PLAYSTATION 20TH ANNIVERSARY

The best ad campaigns
to accompany Sony
consoles over the years
- this one's probably
still our favourite —
have their roots in the
work done by Geoff
Glendenning's team

at the very beginning
of PlayStation's life

recta

quite worried at the time as to whether
customers would be able to keep up with
these changes, and whether we would be
able to sell our games properly. When
FFVII was released, | wanted to see with
my own eyes whether customers would
buy our game or not, so | went out at Zam
— the time that convenience stores opened
— and stood watching in the shops to
check on the customers lining up at the till.
| asked around later and it turns out | was
not the only one who thought like that —
lots of the other team members had also
been on stakeout at their local
convenience stores that morning.

GEOFF GLENDENNING

[UK retail chain] Dixons were very
arrogant in those days, and they believed
through their successes that if you were
launching a consumer electronic product,
it you didn't have Dixons selling it, you'd
fail. It was a real concern, particularly
within the sales department, that we didn't
have Dixons and that potentially we were
going to fail. But | never had any doubt it
was going to be a huge success. | knew
what the word of mouth was with most of
the influencers, and the momentum they
were building up. Then, in Easter 1996,
after we dropped the PlayStation's price,
we outsold Sega's Saturn by eightand-a-
half to one. Dixons came right back on
board then. But | think, to be honest, the
chain was in decline from there.

CHRIS DEERING

Our original European business plan was
to sell around four million PlayStation over
three years, and around 15 million

games. It seemed like an impossible
dream, given the strength of Nintendo and
Sega. | was thrilled to have a go at facing
of against Nintendo’s Howard Lincoln and
Sega's Тот Kalinske, but we were just
hoping at that stage fo get a permanent
seat at the grown-ups’ table. We knew
that the Sony name and image would
expand the console market and make
gaming more respectable as a family
entertainment medium.

My favourite experiences at SCEE
were holding meetings with the heads
of our subsidiaries in 1 2 countries,
including Australia and New Zealand,
and distributors from Iceland and
Scandinavia to South Africa and Turkey
and Saudi Arabia. | was used to dealing
with all of these territories, plus Japan and
South Korea, Taiwan, and all of Latin
America at Sony Pictures, so | wanted to
leverage this with a common plan around
the world, something that Sega and
Nintendo didn't really have, with their
distributors mostly fighting one another,
shipping into each other's markets to
make their numbers.

DOUG BONE

Glen O'Connell from Psygnosis was a
regular customer in HMV and he brought
a PlayStation in to give me a sneak peak
of Wipeout. He then left it there for a
week or so, as he was keen to hear what
sort of reaction it was getting. This was in
early 95 and, in short, the response was
phenomenal. We'd have crowds gathered
in the shop, so we decided to start taking
preorders, months in advance of when we
were officially meant to. HMV head office
found out about this, and their head of
games, Gerry Berkley, called me to find
out where all these preorders had
suddenly come from. Then he decided thot
I'd be the right person to move down to
London and help them launch the console
across the whole chain. Those were my
first steps into the industry.

THE IMPACT

With hindsight, it’s easy to see how
Sony's console disrupted the videogame

market in fundamental ways. The
company’s initial absence of an in-house
software development studio meant that
the company was able to attract all of the
major publishers to create games for its
platform, knowing that their titles wouldn't
be passed over in favour of heovily
marketed firstparty releases.

Sony Music's understanding of the
need for diversity and nurturing small-
studio talent resulted in a wave of new
studios being founded across Japan, all
of which were able to thrive on Sony's
comparatively generous royalty rates.

Meanwhile, the positioning of the
system as an entertainment centre, able
to play music CDs as well as games,
showed the importance of technological
convergence in the home (PS2's DVD-
playing capabilities would lead Sony to
dominate the market in later years), while
the fact that this was marketed as a
machine for adults, rather than a toy for
children, helped broaden the artistic
ambitions of its game makers.

GLEN O'CONNELL

Prior to the European launch titles,
| remember taking home an NTSC

Japanese console in late 1994 with Ridge
Racer and Toshinden for the first time and
being blown away by how incredible it
looked and sounded. | can only describe
it as like having a coin-op in your living
room, especially with the TV volume turned
up. It was such a step up, in terms of
audio and visuals, from SNES and Mega
Drive, or even the CD-based stuff we saw
on Mega CD and 3DO, which felt like
impersonal PC4ype experiences stuck on
CD because they could fill the space.

It's easy to say this now, but it definitely
felt like this little grey box would shine a
big bright light towards the future of the
games industry and do more than any to
deliver the acceptance of gaming as a
credible pastime.

LEE CARUS

Once Wipeout launched, things changed.
The phone started ringing — all of a
sudden other companies wanted to grab
some of the talent that was associated
with Wipeout, with a PlayStation launch
title. | remember walking around one of
the big game shows in London after
launch — was it ECTS? — and people
manning the stands would check out your

Sony's willingness to
embrace risk from the
outset set an agenda
that would see directors
including David Lynch
signed up to create
unusual ads to define
the PlayStation brand
as it's evolved over

the past 20 years

Glen O'Connell headed
up PR for games such as
Wipeout at Psygnosis,
before moving to EA.
He now runs a sports
and entertainment
marketing consultancy

name badge and basically wrestle you
into their meeting rooms for a ‘quick chat’.
A few companies in the US came calling
and even arranged for me and others to
fly out to talk about moving there. |
decided against it in the end, but the
experience changed me. | wanted more
of that, but | wanted to do it with Sony,
and eventually | did. Even now, 20 years
on at Firesprite, I'm still loving the journey,
especially with helping to deliver another
PlayStation launch title with The Playroom
on PSA. | think hardware launches are in
my DNA now. It's a buzz that comes
around infrequently, and the team at the
studio and | love being a part of it.

NICK FERGUSON

FORMER NET YAROZE PROGRAMMER
Sony's Net Yaroze programme is

directly responsible for my career in the
videogame industry. | remember visiting
my friend James Rutherford's student flat
when he showed me his Net Yaroze
game, Snowball Fight, which he'd coded
for a competition in Edge. | was simply
blown away to discover that someone |
knew had written a console game
singlehanded. It was a thunderbolt - |
realised overnight what | wanted to do. |
went out and bought a copy of C For
Dummies the same week. Once | was
contident | could get my head around the
basics of programming, | ordered a Net
Yaroze using the remnants of my student
loan. | wrote one-and-a-half terrible games
for it — | was more of a C script kiddie
than a real programmer, given my reliance
on tutorials and existing source code — but
that was enough in 1999 to get me my
first job in QA. My friend James landed

a programming job at Reflections, starting
there just after the release of Driver.

That was pretty cool, | thought.

GLEN O'CONNELL

Taking home an import machine for the
very first time felt like a Christmas-morning
emotion as a young child. People who
came to my house couldn't believe what
this little grey box was outputting on the
screen. Loaning my local HMV store an
import PlayStation and seeing the
giddiness of the games manager Doug
Bone excitedly showcase it to customers
as they flocked to see it will live long in >

my memory. And getting up early to

drive down to Ейде5 offices in Bath with
Psygnosis's own games, like Wipeout,
remains a definite highlight. There was no
hard sell because everybody wanted to
see it, touch it and talk about it. It was
incredible to have such a wonderful-
looking and -sounding product to help
showcase what the console was all about.
The fact we also took gaming into an
adult environment,with support from bands
like The Chemical Brothers and The
Prodigy across nightclubs, allowed
everybody connected to the game to feel
like they were showcasing it to people
who shared their own personal interests,
as opposed to trying to think what an
eight to tenyyearold may or may not like.

JASON BROOKES

| think [PlayStation's popularity] had a
lot to do with Sony's more open stance
to working with developers. With
PlayStation, Sony opened its doors to
its development environment in the way
that Japanese hardware companies
previously hadn't. Instead of controlling
and restricting information, Sony
development staff, and particularly Phil
Harrison, shifted the power struggles
from a top-down, authoritarian model
to today's more mutually beneficial
developer ‘partnerships’.

For publishers, there were better
economic incentives, too. Through the
late '80s and early '9Os, most game
companies felt trepidation when ordering
production runs through Nintendo and to
a lesser extent Sega, simply because
cartridges cost so damn much that the
financial risks suffered with a flop were
huge. This was lessened with the
PlayStation since the manufacturing
savings of CD-ROM enabled Sony to
carve Y4,000 off the cost of a new
game. The launch lineup of PlayStation
games shipped for 5,800 each - about
£35 at the time — and by comparison
most Super Famicom games were stil

selling tor ¥9,800 yen [£60].

COLIN ANDERSON

From a professional perspective, the
PlayStation had a pretty big impact
because it ultimately ushered in the
CD-ROM as a legitimate mainstream

PLAYSTATION 20TH ANNIVERSARY

mH —

Sony's Net Yaroze
PlayStation, and some
of its best-known
games: Total Soccer,
Terra Incognita and
Snowball Fight

games medium, and that marked a sea
change for anyone working in the field of
game audio, as | was. While there had
been games with CD soundtracks before
then, they were still relatively rare in the
early/mid- 90s. The PlayStation's mass
adoption meant that CD music would soon
become commonplace. Some of the early
PlayStation titles really started taking
advantage of that, probably none so
importantly from my perspective as
Wipeout. Tim Wright's incredible original
soundtrack coupled with the high-protile
addition of tracks by artists like Leftfield
and The Chemical Brothers set a really
high standard for any of us releasing on
the platform after them. That strengthened
my argument a lot when | began
campaigning to have a CD soundtrack
tor Grand Theft Auto. When we initially
started developing GIA it was firmly
expected to have a MIDI soundtrack of
some description, so Craig [Conner] and I
were sketching out ideas as standard MIDI
files, but then by the end of 1995 DMA
had installed one of the world's first entirely
hard-disk-based recording systems to
record a CD soundtrack for the game. l'm
not sure that would have happened if it
hadn't been for the PlayStation putting CD
music front and centre, and Tim setting the
bar so high with Wipeout.

It had such a tremendous effect on the
industry because it fundamentally changed

the culture of gaming. Some of that was
technological — the mainstream adoption
of 3D graphics and CD audio - but most
of it was to do with marketing and
perception, involving companies like
Ministry Of Sound and The Designers
Republic. It took it from a niche industry of
hobbyists and enthusiasts making games
for themselves and their friends, and
began its transformation into the legitimate
massmedia entertainment business it is
today. All of a sudden it was OK for
someone over the age of 14 to admit that
they enjoyed playing computer games. In
today's enlightened society of geek chic,
where it's now cool to be nerdy, it's
actually hard to remember how socially
unacceptable it was to be a gamer in
most circles back in the '9Os. But suddenly
clubs in london and New York were
installing gaming stations sponsored by
Sony where clubbers could relax between
Oakentold sets with a few rounds of Virtua
Fighter or Ridge Racer. That opened up
the entire market for games to a new
demographic, and as a result when our
first PlayStation game eventually launched,
it was selling four copies on PlayStation for
every one it sold on PC.

PlayStation changed the culture by
bringing an adult audience to gaming
who were interested in edgier content than
the traditional fantasy and sci-fi fare our
industry had been renowned for up to that
point. PlayStation suddenly made it cool to
be a gamer. In an industry still convinced
of the importance of technology and
original ideas, it's funny to think that one of
its most significant changes of the past 20
years had almost nothing to do with tech
or ideas at all, and everything to do with
image and perception.

DOUG BONE

The PlayStation made its own rules. It had
a simple proposition — lots of greatlooking
games! — and instead of just aiming low
and trying to engage with youngsters in
the playground, as had happened with
the previous generation, it shot at an

older demographic, confident in the
knowledge that if the big brother wanted
it, then the younger brother would

aspire to it anyway. | was in HMV head
office at the time and you could see
people's attitudes changing, fast. P

“Today I look back on

the more experimental
and strange side of the
PlayStation catalogue and
can see how far ahead

of the curve studios like
NanaOn-Sha and ArtDink
were. Their creativity
continues to inspire me.
When I was a teenager I
desperately wanted to
make PlayStation games.
I spent ages practising
low-polygon 3D models
and optimising my
textures and practising
my vertex lighting. Now

I fantasise about building
programmable graphics
pipelines with bad
anisotropy, rounded
vertex coordinates, and
dithered screen-spaces in
Unity, just to recreate the
look. PlayStation is an
aesthetic in and of itself"

Adam Saltsman
Creator, Canabalt

01 Vib Ribbon (SCE, 1999). 02 LSD: Dream Emulator (Asmik Ace, 1998). 03 Harmful Park
(1999, Sky Think). 04 Bust A Groove (Enix, 1998). 05 Parappa The Rapper (SCE, 1996)

РГТ АЛЛАМ

06 Devil Dice (SCE, 1998). 07 1Q (SCE, 1997). 08 Bushido Blade (Square, 1997).
09 The Book Of Watermarks (SCE, 1999). 10 Incredible Crisis (Tokuma Shoten, 1999)

Remember, this was a time when

Britpop was absolutely booming and
bands like The Prodigy and The Chemical
Brothers were starting to really hit the
mainstream, yet on many a Monday
morning, our MD, Brian Mclaughlin,
would come to the games department
first and ask us stuff like, "How many

Е Is have you sold?" Only then would

he eventually go to the music department
to see how the new Pulp CD had

done. like... wow.

GLEN O'CONNELL

Prior to PlayStation launching, talking of
working in the gaming industry or playing
games to people outside of the industry,
or even to many of your own family and
circle of friends, didn't always seem right.
You'd find yourself not being taken
seriously and asked, "When are you
going to get a real job?" Or people
would say things like, "Games are for
eightyearolds, aren't they?" It was
perceived as much more of a niche
hobby than it is today. While it didn't
change overnight with PlayStation, it was
certainly as big a tipping point for the
gaming industry as any other.

JAKE KAZDAL

| think the impact was partly due to the
face that the prohibitive licensing structure
Nintendo enforced was finally obliterated,
paving the way for many small studios to
do all kinds of fun, weird, new, lower
budget titles. At the same time, it was the
first time 3D gaming had an opportunity to
affect so many people, and really change
the way people felt about videogames. It's
not often such a quantum leap in how
games are perceived comes along, and
this was arguably the biggest transition
gaming had ever experienced. There were
consistently new paradigms and new
genres throughout the life of the
PlayStation, a time of constant discovery
for both developers and players alike.

LEE CARUS

Most of all, | think it was about the
people. There was an almost celestial
alignment of talent that came together,
from fearless, fledgling marketers to execs
that were willing to take a chance on
innovation. From the hardware guys in

PLAYSTATION 20TH ANNIVERSARY

ABOVE The Japan-only

PocketStation, offering

an LCD screen, was
released in 1999.

RIGHT Sony introduced

PSone, a considerably
smaller PlayStation
model, in mid-2000

Teiyu Goto has
revamped his original
design as Sony has
worked through four
generations of PS
hardware, but the
joypad's central form
factor hasn't changed
radically in 20 years

Japan to the dev teams across the world,
this mad, disparate bunch of people was
hauled together under the PlayStation
banner, and it just worked.

MARTIN EDMONDSON

It was a tremendously exciting time to be
in the games industry as we were involved
in something that was cutting-edge and
bursting with explosive potential. Just
before PlayStation | had started to become
a little bored of games, to be honest,
frustrated by the limitations of hardware,
and the PlayStation just blew that all

open again. It was fantastic.

NICK FERGUSON

From my perspective at the time, the
impact was down to the fast, striking 3D
visuals — they improved dramatically in the
first couple of years, and increasingly
made my beloved Super Nintendo look
like a child's plaything. With the benefit
of 20 years' hindsight, Sony's catholic
embrace of the thirdparty development
community probably had as much to do
with it, if not more, than the raw technical
specifications. In the end, everybody was
playing the thing. Whereas childhood had
been neatly divided into ‘Spectrum versus
CÓ4', ‘Atari versus Amiga’ and ‘SNES
versus Mega Drive’, it seemed like

everyone | knew had that ubiquitous grey
box in their bedroom. | would pick the
Nintendo 64 as my favourite console of
that era, in part because of the longevity
of software like Super Mario 64,
GoldenEye, Ocarina Of Time and Banjo-
Kazooie. But those classic Nintendo titles
only came along once or twice a year -
which was just as well because they cost
a fortune on import. It would have been
a lonely and expensive hardware
generation without PlayStation!

MASAYA MATSUURA

Many people would probably say that the
PlayStation's impact was in bringing 3D
computer graphics to the living room, but |
would take one step back from that. At the
time, digital media hardware was rapidly
losing its appeal. People just thought of
these pieces of hardware as some settop
boxes with different brand names.

But the PlayStation was much more
than that. It could be seen as a computer,
a music-playback device, or even just a
toy = it didn't fit into any one category. So
in any given household it could become
a multipurpose tool, and it's this flexibility
that made it a hit. And also, as a result of
some aggressive business concepts, the
titles for the PS1 were really unique and
exciting, piquing the interest of otherwise

uninterested customers as well. The
PlayStation was just this strange magical
box that morphed itself to the specitic
needs of its owner. | think most console
manutacturers have tried to copy this
ever since the PlayStation's launch.

GEOFF GLENDENNING

Why did PlayStation do so well? Well,

it was amazing technology, of course,
and the console itselt looked great.

Sony had brilliant thirdparty developer
relationships and really made it easy for
people to develop for the console. You
know, when | went out marketing
PlayStation | didn't limit myself to Sony
firsiparty games. | looked at the lineup and
said: “Which are the best games out at
the moment?" | remember phoning up the
product manager who was working on
Tomb Raider to ask for three boxes of the
game because | wanted to give them out
to celebrities. He's going, "Oh, I'll have to
check on that." | said: “Listen, I'll buy them
— how much? | need three boxes’ worth -
send them to me now." | bought them from
Eidos just because it was important to
promote the best games. It didn't matter if
they were also on the Saturn. There was
definitely the perception that we had the
best system and the best games. And I like
to think in some way that the marketing
and the way that we approached it had
quite an impact as well.

STEVE LYCETT

I'd worked in games retail, and |'d
actually felt a sense of games fatigue back
then. You'd see waves of games copying
a successful title, like millions of one-on-one
fighters trying to the next Street Fighter.
While | still loved games, | was lapsing
away from them. Seeing the innovation
and invention on the PlayStation,
especially as this was sort of the dawn of
3D games, rekindled the passion and led
to me applying for a job in the industry.

JASON BROOKES

The fact that Sony delivered on pretty
much every promise with the first
PlayStation = from the slick design of the
machine and its unique controller and
memory cards, to its cultivation of
developer relationships and the creation
of memorable software — ultimately

Sony's networked game
strategy may not be its
strongest suit today,
but in 1995 the ability
to connect PS1s to

play linked Destruction
Derby felt like a bold
statement about

the value of multiplayer
gaming on consoles

Outside of the home,
the core PS1 tech still
lives on today - albeit
in small numbers - at
the heart of Namco's
Tekken coin-op cabinet

laid the foundations for the PlayStation
platform as it stands today.

SHUHEI YOSHIDA

With its technology, PlayStation brought
realtime 3D graphics to the hands of
console videogame developers. 3D
graphics had been used in the arcade
and PC game market in limited game
genres like space shooters and racing,
but PlayStation democratised the use of
3D tech so that all genres of games took
advantage, creating amazing new
experiences like Crash Bandicoot, lomb
Raider, Final Fantasy VII, Metal Gear
Solid and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater.

In business terms, the adoption of CDs
had a significant impact to the software
business of the videogame industry. Before
PlayStation, console games were sold on
a cartridge that contained a mask ROM
and took about three months to
manufacture, costing over $10 per
cartridge. Software publishers had to
spend millions of dollars to produce the
initial build of a game, only to see the
game cartridges left unsold at retail or sold
out without a way to quickly produce
additional units. CDs significantly reduced
the risk involved in making videogames,
so new and smaller publishers were able
to enter the market, and new and
unproven concept games were greenlit.

In terms of culture, before PlayStation,
videogames were largely considered toys
for kids. PlayStation had a vision to make
videogames entertainment for everyone,
something cool to do and talk about
among adults.

PlayStation believed in the talent
and passion of videogame developers
and focused on creating a platform
where talented game creators could bring
about exciting interactive experiences
that were only possible on the platform.
Without those amazing PlayStation
games, the technology, the business
model and the culture would not have
meant as much as it did.

MASAYA MATSUURA

There were many Sony Music
Entertainment alumni handling the
software side of things. These people
definitely had a major impact on how
games were made, and even the types
of games that were made and sold at the
time. Things have changed since then,
but | think that the PlayStation's design
strategy has had a major impact on the
industry over the years.

JENS MATTHIES

That Sony was able to go from a standing
start fo establishing the standard format for
games was a monumental achievement.
The PlayStation essentially re-established
the videogame console as an alternative
to the PC for the hardcore gamer.

ADAM SALTSMAN

If Sony can or should be credited with
anything, it's the way the PlayStation
deliberately broke from a number of
conventions in the game industry in order
to court a wider range of people with a
wider range of interests. | think that kind
of long-game diversity play was one

of a handful of moments in the weird
history of videogames that permanently
changed the art form.

TRIP HAWKINS

The combination of costeffective CD
memory and outstanding 3D graphics
allowed all of us to make the kind of
games we had always dreamed of.

SHINJI MIKAMI

From the first PlayStation, | think we started
to see more storytelling in games, which |
think had a profound effect on how we
viewed and interacted with games. | think
people started fo see the potential of
where games could really take us. В

AOXLI

Ae. "and “PlayStation” are registered trademarks of Sony Co
Developed by Sumo Digital. “LitteBigPlanet”, “LittleBigPlanet

ы
c
52
ні
52
Л لے‎
=
5
o ш

logo", “Sackboy” and "Sac койкі"

are trade

Also available on mel JS 3

OVER 9 MILLION | |
: LEVELS TO PLAY,

ALL NEW,
СООР PLAY!)

COLLECTED WORKS
TED PRICE

Publisher SCE Format PS3 Release 2006

OUTERNAUTS

Publisher EA Format PC, iOS Release 2012

SUNSET OVERDRIVE

Insomniac's founder and CEO talks us through the definitive
releases from his two decades in the videogame industry

By Ben MAXWELL

urbank-based Insomniac
might never have existed
were it not for Doom, which
seems like a strange starting
point for a studio that many
know thanks to a purple
dragon and a wombat-
inspired alien with a tiny
robot sidekick. Since its formative act

of id homage, however, the studio has
oscillated between the family-friendly
vibe of Ratchet & Clank and Spyro, and the
darker territory of the Resistance series
and Fuse. But no matter how old the target
audience is, every one of Insomniac's
projects has been fuelled by the studio's
constant desire to push against the limits
of what can be achieved by an independent
developer. Now, 20 years after founding
the studio, Ted Price joins us to recall the
key games and moments that have come
to characterise Insomniac today.

DISRUPTOR

Publisher Universal Interactive Studios Format PlayStation Release 1996

“For me, starting Insomniac was
all about — at least at first — making a
game that was similar to Doom. I was a
big Doom fan, and my personal intent was
to create a firstperson shooter on 3DO,
because it was just out and presented the
first opportunity for a garage developer to
fund his or her own operation, since it
was a relatively cheap platform to build
on. And when my partners, Al and Brian
Hastings, joined me in the summer of
1994, we went full bore into developing
an FPS, which became Disruptor.

When we were developing, it was
really low-tech. We didn't have any real
3D tools, so I would actually design the
levels on graph paper and plot out all the
points before they would be run through
Brian's tools and Al’s engine and we'd end
up with 3D environments in space. That
was how we built our first playable, and
it was incredibly work intensive, but we
were very proud of it.

At the time, we were working with
Universal Interactive Studios as our
publisher, and I remember driving up to
Los Angeles with our first playable that
we worked so hard on, and getting told,
‘This is terrible; this is not a first playable.

"| REMEMBER
DRIVING UP TO
LA WITH OUR
FIRST PLAYABLE,
AND GETTING
TOLD, 'THIS

IS TERRIBLE’”

TOP Disruptor built on
Doom's weapon focus with
special powers called
Psionics, which included
the ability to heal, shock
enemies or raise a shield.
RIGHT Ratchet & Clank
features a wide selection
of exotic weaponry

What are you guys thinking? You better
turn it around’ And that's when we faced
our first taste of the reality of the game
development business: you have to be
better than you think you are to succeed.
So we went back to the drawing board
and rethought how we were making
games, rethought how we were putting
together our levels, rethought how we
were approaching design. And we got a lot
of help from a guy named Mark Cerny,
who stepped in and said, ‘Look, guys, if you
want to make a firstperson shooter, this is
how it should work’ He helped me figure
out a better way to plan, and on a design
side he helped all of us figure out a better
way to lay out levels and think about
enemy placement and weapon strategies.
He and his colleagues brought in a
really talented production designer named
Catherine Hardwicke, who was famous for
Tank Girl at the time, and has gone on to
do a lot of big films since. I remember
meeting Catherine: she walked in and
she had this hat on with a bird on it.
I thought it was a real bird. She's just a
real character, but she's also incredibly
skilled at working with other artists and
helping shape the vision for a movie or a
game. And she really helped us get off the
ground with the visuals for Disruptor. So
those first two years of our existence,
building Disruptor, I probably learned more
than I had learned in the previous ten
years doing anything else.”

SPYRO THE DRAGON

Publisher SCE Format PlayStation Release 1998

“When we finished Disruptor, we
released it to fairly good reviews, but there
wasn’t really any marketing done for the
game and I remember seeing it called ‘the
best game that nobody's ever heard of’ in
a review [laughs]. And we realised that

it was unlikely we would be able to do
another Disruptor, because the audience
wasn’t there. Our team had grown to five
people by then, and we felt like we needed
to move in a different direction. We’d all
been living in this sort of dark world of
Disruptor — even though it was a little bit
campy, it was a fairly dark story and a
dark game — and we wanted to lighten
things up a little bit.

Again, Mark Cerny, our executive
producer at the time, said, ‘Hey, guys,
PlayStation is continuing to grow, but one
area where it hasn't been able to succeed
is the family-friendly market. Nintendo
has a lock on that market. What could
you guys do to break in?'

And so we went into our brainstorming
mode, and one of our artists said, ‘I’ve
always wanted to do a game about a
dragon. All of us glommed onto that idea
and we all had different visions. I mean,
some of us were thinking about a giant
dragon that sets cities on fire. Others were
thinking about families of dragons and
more of an RPG approach. Obviously, we
ended up deciding that we wanted to have
one playable dragon who was a cute
anthropomorphic character rather than
scary, and we worked with an artist named
Charles Zembillas, who started fleshing
out who this guy was.

I remember working directly with
Charles when he was coming up with kind
of an angry version of Spyro, and we had a
lot of miscommunication as we tried to
figure out his personality. We continued
softening Spyro from this almost scary-
looking small dragon to a much more
approachable one. Then it became all
about colour, and it’s funny how you can
have days of arguments over colour.

We went through every colour in the
rainbow. We even went through multiple
colours — we had rainbow Spyros — trying
to figure out what the right colour was.

I remember Craig Stitt was presenting all
of us with different versions of Spyro and
the one that really popped off the page
was the one with the purple body and
yellow horns and the yellow wings.

And that’s where we collectively said,
‘Yup, that's it, let's do it’? Those formative
moments really do stand out for me. Like
when Al got the brand-new engine up and
running. He had been working on this tech
which could draw long distances on
PlayStation 1, which was something that
most games hadn’t been able to do. We
put Spyro in this pastoral setting, where
you could see a castle in the distance and
this big hedge maze, and we had Spyro
gliding over it, and it was another of
those transformative moments for us.

It was a really fun game to make,
because there were very few rules; we had
an animator named Alain Maindron who

would come up with these absolutely
insane characters. I mean, one of the ones
I remember in particular was this cave
creature whose stomach was split down
the middle and bats would fly out.

I think there were some characters
that we ended up discarding on Spyro:
Year Of The Dragon because we had made
the move to introduce other playable
characters, and we went through a lot of
different iterations. The toughest one was
the space monkey, Agent 9. It’s so long
ago, I’m having trouble remembering, but
I do recall a lot of arguments over his laser,
which may not have fit with the game,
but we eventually put him in. My favourite
playable character was Sergeant James
Byrd, the penguin who flies around and
drops bombs. You’ve got this militaristic
penguin dropping bombs in a game about
a dragon, right? But it fits.”

RATCHET & CLANK

Publisher SCE Format PS2 Release 2002

“The reason why Ratchet & Clank
really stands out to me is because it was
the result of an almost disastrous ending
for us. We had been working on a much
more mature game for PlayStation 2, and
we were at the point where we had to
decide whether or not we were going to
move ahead with it. We’d been talking to
Sony about the project, and they came to
us and said, ‘Guys, we don’t think this
particular concept of yours is going to
work. It’s sort of in this middle ground
between being adult and family-friendly —
maybe you guys should go back to what
you're really good at doing, which at that
point was platformers. I was the one who
had been pushing heavily for this new
game with a more mature approach, and
the rest of the team thought I was nuts.
So it was finally time for me to face the
music and admit that I'd been wrong.

We discarded that game and went into
brainstorming mode. We would have
sessions where we'd get a keg and go up to
the roof of our office in Burbank and try
to figure out what the hell was next. That
wasn't particularly successful, but in one
of our smaller brainstorming sessions
Brian Hastings, our creative officer, said,
‘Let’s do a game about a little character,

COLLECTED WORKS

akin to Marvin The Martian, who has
crazy weapons and moves around from
planet to planet’ And that’s when the

core idea for Ratchet was born. And within
a couple weeks, we had changed from
Marvin The Martian to a furry character
with three robot sidekicks.

The initial idea was that Clank would
be three robots, all of whom would attach
to different appendages on Ratchet. One
would ride on his back, one would be on
his arm, and one would be on his leg. It
was a cool concept, because we figured we
could probably combine those robots at
different times in the game and make this
Transformers-esque sidekick, but it
became really complicated, fast. We
realised that we were sort of diluting the
personality opportunity for Clank, and so
Clank became Clank after a few more
weeks and ended up riding on Ratchet's
back in even our most early concepts.

Ratchet also went through some
different concepts. At one point, he was
a space lizard with a tail that would let
him hang onto branches and do acrobatic
moves, but that didn't work either. We
wanted to be more approachable, so that
was when the furry wombat emerged. But
the next step was figuring out what the
hell we were going to do that wasn't a
platformer, because we wanted to move
away from the collectathons that
dominated the market at that point. So
we went back to Brian's original idea,
which was, ‘Hey, let's have this character
use lots of different weapons"

The very first couple of weapons we
built were the Pyrocitor and the Suck
Cannon, which was this big weapon that
sucks things in you can use as projectiles.
That gun was our first realisation that we
could go a little crazy with weapons in our
games. Spyro didn't have any weapons,
but Ratchet was an opportunity to take
our creativity off on a new path. And with
the Suck Cannon, it sort of opened up
everybody's way of thinking, too — it
encouraged everybody to move away from
more traditional weapons and to continue
to surprise ourselves, our publisher and
our fans with this kind of craziness.

After that came the Agents Of Doom,
which was another fun one. I remember
that emerging in the first Ratchet game
distinctly. But I vividly remember Captain
Qwark and his appearance in the game.

COLLECTED WORKS

I think the first cinematic that we did for
the Ratchet series was the Al's Roboshack
commercial. We wanted to come up with a
way to present the story in a different way,
as a sort of societal commentary. Captain
Qwark's facing off against a big Blargian
Snagglebeast, then we freeze frame and
then he asks, ‘Have you ever felt like you
needed to upgrade your weapons?' But
then we switch over to Al's Roboshack
and you've got Qwark in all of his Qwark-
tastic glory, with Jim Ward voicing him,
doing his over-the-top delivery. And

I remember seeing that and going, ‘Yes!
That's the tone! That is our sense of
humour embodied in Captain Qwark’

For me, that moment really set the tone
for the entire series.

What we were doing was trying to
make each other laugh, really, and have
fun. And we weren't thinking too much
about whether or not gamers would find
it appealing, because we're gamers, and
we figured, ‘Hey, if this is what gives us
incentive to come into work every day
and allows us to be creatively free, it's
probably going to have an audience"

God, I remember so many of the
weapons. I mean, the Visibomb was
another of my favourites. That was a
weapon nobody thought we could do in
the studio, because it broke all of our
technology rules within the game. We
needed players to stay within a certain
distance of the ground because of how we
built our levels, but the Visibomb let you
fly up and see the edges of the world. So
we had to come up with solutions for that,
but it also ended up being a real control
challenge, because guiding a cruise missile
— and from firstperson perspective — is a
big jump when you're used to playing a
thirdperson character. So we spent a lot of
time failing until it worked. But it still
ended up being one of the most fun
weapons, because there's this sense of
mastery that you get when you finally
figure out how to control it."

RESISTANCE

Publisher SCE Format PS3 Release 2006

“We’d been working on Ratchet for
a long time [by the time PS3 was revealed
to developers], through the entire PS2

lifecycle, and we were in the process of
building Deadlocked, which for us was
taking Ratchet in a new direction. We were
ready to move into a different genre. So
when we heard about PS3, we knew that
the audience was going to be a more
mature one from the beginning, because
early adopters tend to be the shooter fans,
really. We figured, OK, maybe it's time

to go back to our original roots with a
shooter and do something that's a little
bit more gritty, a little bit darker.

The first conversation I remember
about Resistance was about this scene in
Starship Troopers where the protagonists
are in a temporary encampment and they
see these swarms of creatures coming over
the hills towards them. We wanted to get
that same feeling across in Resistance —
you're completely outnumbered and
you're faced with this alien menace that
numbers in the hundreds of thousands.

We began the game as a space opera.
For six months we were trying to figure
out how to make this story about time
travel, lizard-like enemies and space
marine-esque characters work without
being derivative and we were failing
miserably. It just wasn't feeling good.

And I remember in particular, Connie Yu,
our producer at Sony, coming down and
checking out one of the builds that we had
been making for Resistance and saying,
“You know what, this isn't very fun. It'd be
a lot more fun if you were fighting against
humans: I had a fairly negative reaction,
going, God, you know what, we worked so
hard on these damn lizards. I just don't
want to remove them from the game’ But
she was right.

At the same time, we didn't want to
make a WWII shooter, because those were
in vogue at the time and it seemed like
every shooter had you fighting against
other humans, and so we didn't want to
do that either. We were struggling. But
then we began creating this story about
the Chimera, this race that had seeded
Earth with these giant structures that
were underground and had suddenly
emerged earlier than what would have
been WWII, and had begun converting
humans into these humanoid creatures.

When we started talking about that
story, that really grabbed everybody. It was
a much more grounded approach than
what we had been trying before, and we

wanted to present something that felt
familiar but different. So the story started
talking about how the emergence of the
Chimera would prevent the start of WWII.
That's when the theme of the game began
gaining traction. But before we even got to
that point, we'd also gone down a different
path where we decided that this would be
a WWI game, until we realised that WWI
weapons weren't particularly compelling.
So that's when we decided to place the
game in our own version of the 1950s.

I remember arguing incessantly over
the very first gameplay sequence in the
first Resistance, where we land you in York
and you fight down the street without any
health. There are no health pickups, and
this is before you get your regenerative
powers. I had been pushing really hard to
make sure that we didn't introduce those
powers early, because I wanted to make
sure that we explained why Hale suddenly
has the ability to regen health. But we
couldn't do that until he was infected by
the Chimera, so we had to have a part of
the game where he was just a pure human.
At the same time, we didn't want to have
this different health mechanic that we
only give you for five or ten minutes of
the game, so what ended up happening
was we hit players with a sledgehammer
as soon as they started, which is the total
wrong way to make a game [laughs].

I thought it was easy because I'd played
it 100 times, but I remember watching
people after we got pretty close to the
finish point and thinking, 'Oh my God.
What do we do? People are going to be so
pissed at us!’ There were people pissed,
but there were a lot of people who gutted
it out and got to the regenerative power.”

OUTERNAUTS

Publisher EA Format PC, iOS Release 2012

“Outernauts started out as a small
Facebook game but ended up being one of
the largest games we’ve made in terms of
the geography and number of characters in
the game. It was a big, sprawling game, but
most people didn’t realise it, because we
used 2D art and it looked like a more
traditional Facebook game. Even so, we
had a lot of fans who really got into
exploring the worlds that we presented

in Outernauts and you could do a lot. But
then when Facebook began to decline in
terms of gaming popularity, we knew we
had to change direction. Mobile had been
exploding and we wanted to move into
that field and learn more about the
market and what players wanted.

So the team looked inward and asked,
"What is it that makes Outernauts special?
What can we do that will bring that same
magic to the mobile audience without
creating something that simply won't
work on mobile?' And it became all about
the beasts. We began going nuts with
them, and one of the core elements that
emerged was beast breeding, and that has
become a really important mechanic for
the mobile game. For us, it's been a blast,
because of the complexity of breeding:
there are lots of different families of
beasts, lots of different types, from
common to uncommon to rare to epic to
legendary. And we introduced a bunch of
new mechanics that were surprising even
to us: beast fusion, the crystallisation of
beasts, etc. Being able to dive deep on
mechanics like that in a genre that isn't
necessarily deep was fun for the team, but
it was also a way for us to bring some of
Insomniac's gameplay to that audience.”

SUNSET OVERDRIVE

Publisher Microsoft Format Xbox One Release 2014

“Marcus Smith and Drew Murray
came up with the concept for Sunset
Overdrive at the end of Resistance 3. Drew
had been the lead designer on that game,
and Marcus was the creative director.
They teamed up with the desire to do
something different and that really spoke
to Insomniac’s strengths as a studio —
that wild stylisation and humour.

They presented this game that was full
of tone and style to a bunch of us and we
all really glommed onto it. But then at
one point, we switched direction... We did
this for various reasons, but it became
apparent to me that Sunset Overdrive really
was the game we were supposed to be
making. When we came back to it, we
brought our revised vision of the game up
to Microsoft. Drew and Marcus made one
of the most impassioned presentations
I’ve ever seen, and it culminated with

“THE VISIBOMB
WAS ANOTHER OF
MY FAVOURITES.
THAT WAS A
WEAPON NOBODY
THOUGHT WE
COULD DO”

TOP Resistance: Fall Of Man
saw Insomniac return to its
FPS roots as you fight to
repel the invading Chimera.
ABOVE The studio's first
game for a non-Sony
platform was Outernauts,

a social RPG in which you
breed monsters for battle

Drew jumping up onto a boardroom table
and pretending to surf, describing one of
the mechanics in the game, and it was...
amazing. I think everybody’s jaws in the
room dropped, because you don’t do that
in a presentation! But he was sort of
embodying the tone of the game.

One of my strongest memories was
when traversal started working. I recall
thinking, ‘There’s no way that we’re going
to figure out how to make combat and
grinding work, because as a shooter fan,
and somebody who develops shooters, I’m
so used to the more traditional stick to
the ground, aim, fire, go to cover, right?
That’s what we’re all used to, and to try to
envision how you could be grinding on a
wire at incredible speeds but then also
accurately shooting enemies that are
several meters below you didn’t make any
sense. And it didn’t make sense to a lot of
people on the team until [lead designer]
Cameron Christian and our designers
really dug in and began examining the
metrics and the aiming mechanics for the
game, and asking what really would make
this fun? Why is it currently frustrating?
Why are people throwing their controllers
when they have to grind and shoot?

It took a lot of collaboration between
Cameron and our gameplay programmers
to figure out the magic combination. And
it turned out to be a combination of speed,
and pulling some tricks behind the scenes
for aiming and enemy behaviour. And we
started building on that with the Style
system. I can’t remember who proposed it,
it might have been Drew, but we needed a
reason to get people grinding. It’s not
enough to just say, ‘Oh, it’s fun to balance
and grind from wires. Sure, that’s fun for a
while, but at some point you need to be
rewarded for it. So everyone racked their
brains until the Style system was born.

As for going back to Resistance, because
we're independent and we're IP creators,
I've learned to say never say never. I do
feel that with Sunset Overdrive, Outernauts,
and Ratchet & Clank going on right now,
there's a sense of optimism for us, because
we're working on games that are seriously
fun to create, games that have far fewer
rules than realistic games. And as creators
there's nothing better to feel like than that
you can experiment and whatever you
come up with will probably fit in these
crazy worlds that you're creating." ІШ

| HE

NO
MORE
HEROES

How losers everywhere influenced
Suda5 1's seminal offbeat action game

By DANIEL ROBSON

Format Wii
Publisher Marvelous Entertainment (JP), Ubisoft (NA), Rising Star Games (EU)
Developer Grasshopper Manufacture
Origin Japan
Debut 2007

verything began with Travis louchdown.
One of gaming's most unlikely antiheroes,
Touchdowns tale is of an American otaku
idiot who decides to use the beam katana
he wins in an online auction to become a top-
ranked killer and impress a girl, and it was the
first bit of No More Heroes to pop into being.
Once Goichi ‘Suda51’ Suda came up with his
lead, based loosely on Jackass goofball-in-chiet
Johnny Knoxville, everything else followed.

"| wanted Travis to be like a big schoolboy
who sometimes jokes around and is sometimes
deeply serious, and who loves to fight,” Suda
tells us in the meeting room of Grasshopper's
Tokyo office — itself as cluttered with character
tigures, DVDs and pop-culture ephemera as
Touchdown's own motel room. “Travis is a little
similar to me. If | had been an American otaku,
what kind of life would | have led? Of course,
I'd have been a top-ranked assassin," Suda
laughs. "He's a very human character, and
one that fits within an action game."

So everything began with Touchdown -
except that perhaps it all started with Killer7.
Suda's 2005 GameCube collaboration with
Shinji Mikami was a violent action game with
heavily stylised cel-shaded visuals and a deep
combat system, clearly laying the path that No
More Heroes would travel. And despite a mixed
critical reception, Killer7 became a cult classic in
the west, prepping a fanbase for Touchdown's
madcap debut. Released on Wii in December
2007 in Japan and a few months later overseas,
No More Heroes would cement Suda and
Grasshopper Manufacture s reputation for
offbeat action, but it didn't establish it.

Suda admits to us that his memory is hazy,
but by his recollection the game was conceived
sometime in early 2005, shortly before the
release of Killer7. More significantly, the idea
came some months before the unveiling of Wii
at that year's E3, and its controller at Tokyo
Game Show a few months later. No More
Heroes had originally been intended for 360,
"but then we saw the Wii Remote", Suda recalls.
“It seemed perfect for the beam katana.”

Named after a song and album by The
Stranglers and infused with punk attitude, No
More Heroes is a game of boss battles, of
learning enemy patterns and knowing when to
attack or defend. It allows players to brandish
the Wii Remote as a laser sword, holding it high
or low and pressing A for corresponding attacks,

The parry system proved tricky to master, bringing a dash
of additional complexity and risk to the combat system

with the Nunchuk for movement. Although the
original Wii Remote could not offer perfect parity
with sword swings, No More Heroes still ended
up being a better lightsaber sim than any Star
Wars game, combining physical action and
precision timing to great effect. And the bizarre

“TRAVIS IS A LITTLE
SIMILAR TO ME.

IF | HAD BEEN AN
AMERICAN OTAKU,
WHAT KIND OF LIFE
WOULD | HAVE LED?"

addition of wrestling throws only made the
game more appealing.

It wasn't easy to perfect this fight system,
though. "We didn't know how to program for
the Wii controller yet, and making it slash the
way we wanted was extremely challenging,"
says battle programmer Toru Hironaka. "It took
a long time to make it feel satisfying.”

"We found that attacking with only motion
control was exhausting, so that's when we
added the use of the A button," Suda adds.
“We made about four or five iterations before
we nailed the combat."

Touchdown earns newer and stronger beam
katanas throughout the game, but his abilities
are nonetheless hampered by a brilliant bit of
balancing: the weapons all run on batteries.
Attacking and blocking wear down the power,
which can be charged by scarce power-ups ог
by pushing the 1 button and shaking the Remote

vigorously, leaving Touchdown vulnerable to
attack. Suda says that this limitation was a way
to stop the combat becoming too easy.

"| owned a flashlight that you could shake
to recharge its battery," he says. "I thought a
motion like that would suit the Wii Remote, and
it also looks like, uh..." He mimes waggling the
controller near his crotch, laughing. "That kind
of motion is very Travis."

Its controls are only part of what make the
game such a joy to play, with much of the
appeal coming from the parade of colourful boss
battles. Inspired by the duels in the 1970 cult
film El Topo, the premise is that in order to work
his way up the leaderboard of the United
Assassins Association (UAA}, Touchdown has

to enter fights against ten killers. This progression
is soon disrupted by story twists, but reaching the
next eccentric boss and figuring out his or her
weakness proves a powertul draw.

Taking inspiration trom American subcultures
such as superhero comics and the sexually
charged female archetypes of a thousand
B-movies, these memorable antagonists include
singing cowboy Dr Peace, who Touchdown
tights in a baseball stadium (Hironaka: “It's hard
to get close to him in the stadium, which made it
a unique battle"; Holly Summers, a soldier with
a prosthetic leg who has dug invisible pit traps
in the beach on which they duel (Hironaka:
"Those traps drove some people crazy"); and
Bad Girl, a blonde bombshell who uses her
stable of loyal gimps to grief you (Suda:

"People still cosplay as her today").

But Suda is a master of subverting
expectations, and not every fight ends as the
games structure might have dictated. After a
lengthy build-up, for instance, Letz Shake and his
gargantuan Earthquake Maker get sliced in half
by yet another adversary in anticlimactic yet
comical fashion. "The development schedule
was looking tight, and there were so many boss
battles already, so | decided to write the Letz
Shake fight out of the script," Suda laughs.

The game was also originally due to end
with Touchdown's death at the hands of Sylvia,
the UAA agent who used her sexuality to
manipulate him throughout the game. After the
final ranked match, she was to shoot him — but
her charm was considered deadly enough.

"Sylvia knows she's sexy and she uses it
as a weapon," says senior character artist >

THE MAKING OF...

Takashi Kasahara. "She was an easy character
to model because her personality was so strong.
It wasn't my intention when | made her, but early
in development someone commented that she
reminded them of Scarlett Johansson."

With so much violence, sexual innuendo and
swearing in the English-only script, it seems almost
incredible that No More Heroes was originally a
Wii exclusive. But since the small team of around
30 was building the game with its own bespoke
engine over a cycle of less than two years, it was
just too difficult to develop it for multiple platforms.
And in any case, Suda insists the plattorm holder
made no complaints about the content.

“They were very supportive, especially
Nintendo Of America and Nintendo Of Europe,"
he says. “In Japan and also in Europe, we
released a lighter version, where the heads don't
fly like they do in the American version. The
mature content was only in the American version."

Besides, the violence is tempered by playful
presentation, No More Heroes putting its heritage
front and centre by implementing a mishmash of
retro styles. Touchdown’s energy is a pixellated
heart-shaped gauge; the post-boss scoreboards
resemble something from an ‘80s arcade cabinet,
and sound effects include bleeps and bloops
reminiscent of 8bit Nintendo games.

“Travis is an otaku, and those elements were
little peepholes into his world," Suda says. “For
No More Heroes, | wanted to mix up all kinds of
cultures, including videogames.”

As for the celshaded visuals, Suda says using
strong light and shadow was a thematic choice.
Kasahara also draws a link to Suda's legacy:
“Since it was a game about an assassin, we
wanted to reference Killer7, which also used cel-
shading. But it wouldn't be interesting if it looked
exactly the same, so we made it look grittier."

The game's one major flaw is its hub world.

In between ranked fights, Touchdown can explore
the town of Santa Destroy, visiting locations where
he can learn new skills, upgrade his beam katana
or buy clothes. But Santa Destroy is a ghost town,
a sparsely populated and eerily quiet open world.
Unlike the swordplay, Touchdown’s chunky
Schpeltiger motor scooter is clumsy, with poor
collision detection, while popup in Santa Destroy
is extreme. The result looks cheap, and Suda
knows it. "| wanted to do more, but we didn't
have time and the budget wasn't that big," he
says. "That was the limit of what we could do."

Goichi Suda
CEO, Grasshopper

Manufacture

Did the game turn
out as planned?

| think we managed
to achieve almost
everything we wanted to with No More
Heroes, including having a stab at an open-
world game. With a small team, we managed
to put together all sorts of ideas and make a
great game. | think we all felt that way.

What would you do differently if you had the
chance to go back?

There were a lot of bugs in the Ul. And the
challenge of making an open world... It was
supposed to be a small town, but | wanted it to
be more of a mix [of activities], and on the
current generation we can do that. But it's
actually more of a closed world, a small town
where people live their lives, so | would like to
have made more of that concept.

Why did you let Shinobu live after her defeat?
| wanted to have one character who was a bit
like Travis’ apprentice, or a level below him,
and Shinobu seemed like the right one. She
became a very interesting character, | think.

Defeated enemies explode into a shower of
coins, an effect that was also used in the Scott
Pilgrim Vs The World movie.

We were first! We tried it out and it felt good
to have those coins go kerching, kerching,
kerching. It was very effective. | met [Scott
Pilgrim director] Edgar Wright and he told me
himself it wasn't plagiarism!

Despite starring in a Nintendo exclusive,
Travis had a fondness for rival hardware.
Yes, he has a Mega Drive and a Mega CD.
Travis is a hardcore gamer, so he'd be into
Sega hardware rather than Nintendo [laughs].

Still, the open-world section does serve a
purpose, which is to act as a palate cleanser. To
earn entry into the boss fights, players have to
undertake deliberately monotonous parttime jobs,
such as collecting coconuts trom trees or mowing
the lawn — tasks based on numbing repetition.

“During the fight sections, you tense up and
have to be alert, so in the open-world section you
can take it easy,” Suda says. “Travis doesn’t just
tight; he also has to live his lite... If you have to
work a job, it makes you look forward to the
fights even more."

Ultimately, the combat proved so addictive
and the presentation so charming that many critics

and players found it easy to forgive the game's
shortcomings. "It reviewed better than we'd
expected, which made us very happy," Suda
says. "We thought the game was fun to play with
the Wii Remote, but we weren't sure how the
public would take to it. It's such a strange game,
and Travis is an idiot, so | wondered how it would
fare overseas. But in the end the reaction was
even better in the US and Europe than in Japan."

Indeed, the original Wii version of the game
sold some 290,000 copies in North America
and 160,000 in Europe, plus а lessthanthrilling
40,000 in Japan. A sequel, No More Heroes 2:
Desperate Struggle, was quickly confirmed,
again exclusive to Wii, and the original game
was ported to PS3 and Xbox 360 as No More
Heroes: Heroes' Paradise (handled by Japanese
publisher Marvelous Entertainment and Feelplus).

Grasshopper rarely makes sequels, preferring
to focus on new IP where possible, but although
he had been so close to killing off his hero for
good, Suda says he was eager to return fo
Touchdown's weird little world for Desperate
Struggle. "No More Heroes was a smash hit as
far as we were concerned, and | wanted to return
to it and to make it a series over which we would
take great care," he says. "I often get asked to
make a third game. Right now we're busy with
let It Die, but Travis is a character we could even
return fo in ten years’ time. When the timing is
right, l'd like to do so."

In addition to spawning a sequel, No More
Heroes expanded on what Grasshopper had
begun with Killer7, framing it as a top-rate action-
game studio with a subculture streak and setting
in motion a loosely linked ‘series’ of thematically
similar titles, including 2012's giddily gaudy
zombie slasher Lollipop Chainsaw and 20135
dark but grandiose Killer Is Dead.

Suda knows he owes it all to Touchdown -
and he feels that in the assassin lies not only a bit
of himself and Johnny Knoxville, but also a bit of
all of us. “Travis is a loser who eventually tinds
purpose,” Suda says. “OK, it's as a killer, but in
his chosen field he grows stronger and finds
success. And as his fighting skills increase, so
does his spirit. It's a story about growing up. We
all have to fight in our daily lives and to try hard,
and by doing so our horizons become broader.

"Travis is a fighter, and he always looks
forward to the next challenge. | wanted to
make a game that would inspire players to
feel excited about life." I

O Early storyboards show
how defined the characters
were, even at the beginning.
Q The cel-shaded style was

a deliberate nod to previous
Grasshopper title Killer7.

Ө The small team imposed
some limitations, not least of
which was a single format.

© The Three Girl Rhumba's
Sword belied owner Shinobu's
schoolgirl status, with its
collection of cute charms
dangling from the scabbard.
Ө The Schpeltiger motor
scooter was Touchdown's main
mode of transportation around
the open world, though its
handling was atrocious.

@ "I'ma loser, baby, so why
don't | kill you": the character
of Travis Touchdown arrived
more or less fully formed in
director Goichi Suda's head.
@ The idea for sword-based
combat came first, but the
unveiling of the Wii Remote
gave it an ideal platform

experimentation

UBISOFT
MONTREAL
and open worlds

The flagship studio talks

controversy,

| % ү :
. m Е Ф B

*
=
Т

CAFÉ VIENNE

1 I а т“
УНЕ шш; h ii qu Ana mrs
T MEA | My Н ui "a ii 1 '
„кН И ki АҢ ү ГИҢ | | |
; „004 і | t |

tie
ИКИ

è
т

è
D i
т:

o far, 2014 has been a difficult year for

the leadership of Ubisoft Montreal. The

flagship developer of Assassins Creed

and Far Cry has barely been able to
escape one controversy before yet another
brouhaha ensnares it, with accusations of sexism,
graphical downgrades and overly strict DRM
ricocheting across the Internet. It can't even show
off a game's boxart without then having to
publicly explain why it isn't racist.

A few instances of questionable messaging
haven't helped the studio's image, but it's also
had to weather the inflammatory effect of online
interactions. Studio CEO Yannis Mallat, c
1 5-year Ubisoft veteran who has been head of
Montreal since 2006, accepts that when your
creations reach an audience of upwards of ten
million, you're bound to receive some negativity.

"These things happen - they'll always be
there," Mallat says. "Our games reach a lot of
people, so | guess it's normal to have things said
about these creations. | think that human nature is
such that we usually talk more about what could
be seen as bad, rather than good.

“That's too bad, because in the world there
are many good things, but we're OK with that.
What we're not OK with is when there are things
said that are not true and that touch on very
sensitive subjects that are absolutely not our
intentions. | think that the people that say those
things need to exert themselves to know more
about what we do in general, rather than just
looking at one issue in a game.”

And Ubisott does put a great deal of thought
into marketing and positioning its games, often
successfully. The proof is plain to see: a mixed
critical reception and a helping of controversy
over graphical quality didn't stop Ubisoft shipping
eight million copies of Montreal's Watch Dogs to
retailers in under two months — an industry record
at the time for new IP. Outlandish fairytale RPG
Child Of Light also found an audience after
being pitched as a small indie title, despite the
game being made by one of the biggest
development houses in the world.

Much of this is undoubtedly thanks to Ubisoft's
Paris editorial team, profiled in E266, which
scrutinises and approves every aspect of projects
in development. But credit must also go to the
unseen but influential brand managers, a band
of marketers embedded within each game
development team. Ubisoft's wider corporate
obsession with fusing communications and
creative departments is what most distinguishes
Montreal from its many neighbouring studios —

Ubisoft Montreal's CEO, Yannis Mallat (left). Lionel Raynaud
joined Montreal from the company's Parisian editorial team

"We were the first," Mallat is keen to stress —
though credit is also deserved for the Canadian
studio's own culture of nurturing talent from within.

At 2,600 employees, Ubisoft Montreal is
one of the biggest developers in the industry,
and its main tivetloor building, a former textile
factory, and nearby offices feel more like a
college campus than your average place of
work. Opened in 1997, following the lure of

UBISOFT’

А |

Founded 1997

Employees 2,600

Key staff Yannis Mallat (CEO), Lionel Raynaud
(VP of creative), Patrick Plourde (creative
director, Child Of Light), Alex Hutchinson
(creative director, Far Cry 4)

URL Iwww.montreat.UDISOTT.CO

Selected softography Assassin's Creed,
Splinter Cell, Prince Of Persia: The Sands Of
Time, Far Cry 4, Assassin's Creed Unity
Current projects Rainbow Six Siege

2, Assassins Creed: Brotherhood and Far Cry 3,
and who was seeking a new challenge following
years spent making Ubisoft blockbusters.

"We understood that it took a lot of energy
to release big games like that,” explains creative
VP Lionel Raynaud, a veteran of 14 years who
oversees content for all of Ubisoft's games.
"[Plourde] pitched us the creative idea and we
said yes. We were proud to deliver something
new and unique — a lot of people were surprised
that Montreal was delivering this kind of game.
The team learned a lot about RPG mechanics
during development and this has resulted in us
creating a core team. The people who made this

SMALLER RELEASES REPRESENT AN
OUTLET FOR EXPERIMENTATION, AS WELL
REINVIGORATING EXPERIENCED STAFF

generous Canadian tax credits, Ubisoft Montreal
is now the focal point of the publisher's sprawling
international studio network, helming a long list of
the industry's biggestselling series. The sprawling
development teams for Assassins Creed and Far
Cry occupy entire floors of Montreal's red-brick
HG, but recently the studio has made headlines
as much for its smaller passion projects as its
thousand-strong productions. 1980sthemed
Far Cry 3 spinoff DLC Blood Dragon and
Patrick Plourde's Child Of Light both show a
willingness to indulge in creative risks alongside
the yearly iterations of proven moneyspinners.
The latter game has been a selFproclaimed
success for Montreal, resulting in its developers
being installed as a core team. For the studio at
large, these smaller releases represent an outlet
for experimentation, as well as a means of
reinvigorating the studio's most experienced staff
after extensive spins in the blockbuster cycle. The
pattern was set by Patrick Plourde, the veteran
designer and creative director who had led
development on the likes of Rainbow Six Vegas

game want to work together again, whether

it's on a small game or not." Plourde has since
moved on to a new project, separate from the
Child Of Light team, while another of the studio's
senior creatives, Far Cry 4 lead Alex Hutchinson,
has had a similarly personal project greenlit.

"| think it's superinteresting to create this
rhythm in the careers of creative guys, allowing
them to work on triple-A games and then do
something different and then maybe go back,"
says Raynaud. "This dynamic has incredible
value in the industry and it's what we want to
do: create core teams that want to make great
games. If only for that, it's a huge benefit. We
will encourage other initiatives like Child Of
light, and there’s a chance that we will have
many more games like that in the future."

Although Ubisoft Montreal is financially
dependant on the success of its blockbuster
sequels, Mallat says it's important that the firm
isn't reliant on its biggest projects as its sole
sources of innovation. “It is important to try new
things. That being said, you're touching ona №

STUDIO PROFILE

very interesting point in terms of managing
creativity: it's important for those [smaller] projects
not to be suffocated at the beginning by high-
pressure objectives. That's where part of my job
is really interesting, because it's a question of
growing the talent that we've noticed, giving
them a chance and managing the risk and trying
new things without breaking the balance of
delivering the expected big projects."

It sounds appealing when put like that, but
is the studio any less riskaverse these days, or
simply better at compartmentalising its gambles?
Ubisoft Montreal has built a reputation on its
diverse portfolio of artistic styles, but mechanically
its big-name releases are increasingly fixated on
the familiar structures of systemic open-world
play that have brought the company so much
success in the past. Towers to scale that unlock
sections of map, outposts fo clear of resistance,
distractions and collectibles aplenty on the
minimap: all are familiar to players in 2014,
and many are parts of a formula that Ubisoft
has evolved and perfected since the original
Assassin 5 Creed. But overexposure has bred
a growing disdain at the company's dedication
to this admittedly effective template.

There are whispers, however, that the
company's creatives are prepared to make some
changes, most specifically to the way narrative
plays out within Ubisoft's overworked open-world
framework. Mallat calls it one of his studio's
"most interesting” current challenges. "I think the
open-world structure allows for every kind of
experience to exist, and we can clearly see that
with Far Cry, Assassins Creed and Watch
Dogs," he says. "They are all different types

of games, but with open worlds we have the
conviction that we are answering players’ needs,
even if they are not clearly expressed, in the
way that they like to be immersed in worlds.

100

"We don't ask our teams to make an open
world — we want to switch from making story-
driven games fo creating ‘worlds’. In terms of
creation, it really is two different things; we want
our teams to create worlds in a very cohesive
and coherent way, within which there will be
many stories to tell."

Mallat insists that despite a willingness to
explore a ditferent approach with storytelling,
Montreal is as dedicated to building narratives as
it ever was, only in future it wants to experiment
with having player actions shape the experience,
as opposed to the linear rhythms of Watch

Dogs and Assassins Creed. Crucially, there
are also signs that it's preparing to extend the

Ubisoft Montreal has several development teams spread across a former textile factory,
with some of its biggest games taking up entire open-plan floors. The colossal red-brick
structure also houses a dedicated playtesting lab, a mixing room and its own foley studio

game needs to have an impact. That's very
important for us, because we see that as a
way to make our creations more mature and
profound. By just telling a story, maybe we'll
miss that objective."

Ubisoft Montreal's management team will
be the first to admit that its somewhat unorthodox
approach to development isn't faultproof, but
company culture puts heavy emphasis on learning
from past mistakes, rather than never making
them, as is evident from the number of times it
has followed up a disappointing release with a
winner. But where other publishing giants can
come across as inherently mechanical in their
approach to the game development, Ubisoft's

THE CULTURE PUTS HEAVY EMPHASIS
ON LEARNING FROM PAST MISTAKES,
RATHER THAN NEVER MAKING THEM

pipelines of these key series, with leadership

of one future Assassins Creed instalment
officially handed over to Montreal's neighbouring
Quebec City studio, a move it says will give
teams at the flagship studio more time to
experiment with the series it created.

"We want the players agenda within the
game world to rule their own experience. | think
it answers the player's need to spend more time
within games and it also allows many ways to
carry the messages that our creatives want to
broadcast," Mallat says. “VVe used to say that
after you've played a Ubisoft game, we want
you to be left with something to think about =
about you or the world. That's a process that
needs to take time, within which you need to
reflect or think. In order for that to really change
something inside you, everything you do in the

philosophies feel undeniably human, and like
any human, sometimes it can slip up.

It's testament to this ethos that, even though
itis 17 years old, the studio still sees itself as
having a lot to learn, and is still trying to perfect
the balance between words and actions in an
occasionally harsh environment. "We used to
say that the foundation myth of this studio is to
be very young — and the average age here is
young," Mallat tells us. "Of course, when you
have 2,600 people, it's hard to keep that
average down. But it's still part of how we see
the world through our games. | do think that
when you join our studio, you feel that it's unique.
Over time, we are still managing to master the
balance [of business and production], because
the studio is only a teenager. We're not a baby
any more, but we're certainly maturing.” Bl

© Watch Dogs was a commercial
success for Montreal, but DLC Bad
Blood swaps Aiden Pearce for the more
likeable Raymond 'T-Bone' Kenney.

® Splinter Cell (2002) was Montreal's
first homegrown franchise. Its most
recent iteration was 2010's Conviction.
Ө Assassin's Creed veteran Patrick
Plourde directed Child Of Light. He's
moved on, but the core team remains.
Û Far Cry 3 sees a small group of
thrill-seekers stranded on a pirate-
infested island. The Montreal team
has expressed regret over the decision
to kill off charismatic villain Vaas.

is an example of the consistency
Montreal encourages across game
production and marketing teams.

EDGE 101

REVIEWS. PERSPECTIVES. INTERVIEWS. AND SOME NUMBERS

Explore the iPad

edition of Edge for
extra Play content

102

STILL
PLAYING

Destiny 360, PS3, PS4, Xbox One

Bungie's insistence that it is listening to
player feedback is hard to reconcile with its
treatment of the Vault Of Glass. Ignoring a
swarm of nasty bugs, the studio focused on
changing a key mechanic in the final boss
fight, adding more randomisation to a
game that is already as good as defined
by RNG. The raid is still fantastic, and the
game remains irresistible, but Bungie can
only abuse its players’ goodwill for so long.

Minecraft PC, 360, PS3, PS4, Vita, Xbox One

Until recently, the idea that Mojang would
sell to anyone at all was anathema, let
alone that the buyer would be Microsoft.
But despite the corporate changes behind
the scenes — the deal was officially signed
off this month - construction of our small
castle compound continues apace and
without interruption. It doesn't really matter
who owns the game when the world
already feels like a second home to us.

The Binding Of Isaac: Rebirth PC, PS4, Vita
Edmund McMillen’s remake of his Flash
game, Rebirth expands the original’s
macabre adventure with additional bosses,
enemies and items. Returning foes have
also been retuned and feature more varied
behaviour, and a new weapon combo
system gives you the chance to create

new tools as the cumulative effects of your
items stack up. We can confidently say
that we've never had this much fun

fleeing from a knife-wielding relative.

REVIEWED
TALS ISSUE

104 Sunset Overdrive
Xbox One

108 LittleBigPlanet
PS3, PS4

12 Call Of Duty:

Advanced Warfare
360, PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox One

114 The Evil Within
360, PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox One

116 Lords Of The Falle

D D
A Хрох Une

118 Sid Meier's Civilization:

Beyond Earth
PC

20 The Legend Of Korra

00, PC Po, Рой, Х90Х Une

22 Fantasia: Music Evolved

23 The Sailor’s Drea
i0

Freedom of movement

The way we look at videogame worlds is dictated by the character under our
control. In GTA, your eyes usually fall on the nearest car, then the road ahead,
and, intermittently, the GPS in the screen's bottom corner. In Assassin's Creed,
your eyes dart upwards, plotting a course from window frame to cornice to
rooftops, from which you take the straightest route to your destination.

In Sunset Overdrive (p 104), you look everywhere at once. There is no correct
roule in a game where absolutely everything can be grabbed, swung on,
grinded or bounced off. It is liberating, and quite overwhelming at first, every bit
as refreshing as the first time you made Altair clamber up the side of a building.
As a simple exercise in the joy of locomotion, Sunset Overdrive is a delight.

So too is Call Of Duty: Advanced Warfare (0112), in which Sledgehammer
Games does to the most rigidly defined template in games what Insomniac has
done for open-world play. COD has always been about an
objective marker and the enemies in between, and that's
still the case here, but the Exo suits toys and moveset put
a fresh spin on this tired old formula. And that goes triple
tor LittleBigPlanet З (p 108], with its new characters adding
inventive tweaks to Sackboy’s distinctive platforming.

A little tresh thinking can go a long way in livening up
something established, but the execution is as important
as the inspiration. That's something that was clearly lost on
Lords Of The Fallen (p1 16) devs Deck13 and CI Interactive.
Their game wants so desperately to be Dark Souls that it can
only suffer from the comparison, and while some of its new
ideas are additive, they come at the cost of misinterpreting
what made its idol so rare. As such, Harkyn's abilities have
little bearing on how we look at the world beyond making
us wish we were playing the game LOTF seeks to imitate.

103

PLAY

Sunset Overdrive

he dialogue in Sunset Overdrive may be peppered
with profanity, but there's one word conspicuously
absent from its vocabulary: restraint. Insomniac's
noisy, boisterous Xbox One exclusive turns everything
up to 11, starting with its hyper-saturated colours.
Its gaudy sandbox is strewn with clutter — there are
no fewer than seven collectible types, each of which
functions as a different form of currency. Indeed, it's so
densely stuffed with things to do, see, shoot and pick
up, its map pockmarked with icons and waypoints, that
Ubisoft will surely be taking notes.

By genre standards, it gets down to business in
satisfyingly brisk fashion. An energy drink, Overcharge
Delirium XT, has transformed Sunset City's population
into pustular mutants, and its maker, Fizzco, has locked
down the city in a massive cover-up, erecting energy
barriers to prevent people from escaping. A clutch of
survivors remain alongside a larger group of scavengers
and Fizzco's own robotic cabal, which use electric-blue
blades and bullets to deal with troublemakers.

The regular freaks, AKA OD, lollop after you,
lunging forward and attacking with vicious melee
swipes. Should they slurp down any more Overcharge,
they'll metamorphose into Poppers, creatures covered
in tartrazine growths. These must be burst from a safe
distance lest they get too close and explode in your face.
The giant Herkers, meanwhile, throw large objects and
smaller mutants from excavator scoops embedded in
their swollen arms. All will shear large chunks from
your health gauge if you're not careful, and given that
your unnamed avatar is incapable of breaking into
anything more than a gentle jog on foot, you're
strongly encouraged to stay off the ground.

Initially, at least, that's quite the challenge. From
the outset, you're able to grind across just about any
horizontal edge, whether it's railings, the side of a truck,
or a rooftop, plus you can ride on overhead wires, or
dangle beneath them from a hook. Alternatively, you can
bounce upon cars, parasols, awnings and bushes, though
you'll most often use these to reach a higher place from
which to grind. Changing direction is a simple matter of
pushing the analogue stick and pressing X; a tap alone
enough to flip from over- to undergrinds and vice versa.

For the most part, then, you'll be aiming downward
while in constant motion. Sniper rifles are obviously
out of the question, while area-of-effect munitions are
in. You'd expect an inventive arsenal from a studio that
made its name crafting unusual ordnance for the Ratchet
& Clank and Resistance games, and you'd be right to,
though most are analogous to familiar firearms. The
TNTeddy, which fires explosive soft toys, is a grenade
launcher in all but name, while Insomniac is careful to
assuage the fears of any Xbox owners unaccustomed
to such an outlandish arsenal, amusingly likening a
weapon that shoots fireworks to an assault rifle.

104

Publisher Microsoft
Developer Insomniac Games
Format Xbox One

Release Out now

Is so densely
stuffed with
things to do,
see, shoot
and pick up
that Ubisoft
will surely be
taking notes

Meanwhile, successful traversals between grinds
and bounces build a Style meter, which allows you to
augment your moves courtesy of equippable buffs, here
termed Amps. Hit the first tier and your dodge-rolls
will damage enemies you collide with, or you might
Opt for a forcefield that prevents mutant swipes from
connecting. The second tier may see your melee attacks
produce a fireball or tornado, while the third could
result in a spray of shrapnel from divebomb attacks.
Some Amps are purely cosmetic, however, with one
causing foes to explode into glittering confetti.

You could cut a decent trailer from the highlights
of the first few hours, but it would create a misleading
impression of the awkward, messy opening. Chaining
moves is straightforward enough, but when you're
facing a group of mutants capable of leaping to your
level and assaulting you from multiple directions, you'll
spend a lot of time wrestling desperately with the
camera, often grinding back and forth across the same
edge or in a circle while regularly pulling up the radial
weapon menu because you're out of ammo. Some would
argue limiting supplies encourages experimentation,
but at times it's dispiritingly disempowering.

It hardly helps that Insomniac is so desperately
keen to ensure you're not missing anything that it
assails you with information, all but overwhelming you
in the process. Then, of course, you've got all those
collectibles to contend with: money for clothes, hats
and accessories; drinks cans for weapons, ammunition
and maps that show you the locations of the other five
object types. You'll need the latter, too: the pace is so
relentless and the aesthetic so bright and busy that it's
easy to miss items. More often than not, we collected
them accidentally, gliding backwards over a pair of
shoes trailing from a wire while escaping a horde of OD.

Soon you'll be told that certain activities will earn
you badges that convey additional perks, and in case
you'd forgotten about any of this, text overlays will
remind you that it's been five minutes since you last
hit the menu button. Occasionally, your avatar will
even chip in that you haven't purchased a new gun for
a while. About six hours in, we were presented with
a tutorial for the wall-run mechanic, arriving at least
three hours after we'd mastered it.

Still, the simple joy of locomotion is enough to
compensate for this aggressive handholding. Movement
is sharp and responsive, with a generous degree of
freedom when airborne and just the right amount of
stickiness for grinding. Once you've unlocked a high
bounce and an air dash, which perhaps should be
available earlier, you'll be racing between objectives
without ever touching down. Sunset City is quite the
sprawl, but while a fast-travel option between key
locations is available, by hour seven you'll never feel

| i
ишү ine thease сопот

—L ESAE,

mm —
سےا‎ ET

ABOVE Completing most tasks unlocks new clothes, which you can buy
from a vendor who pops up around the city. Refreshingly, you can switch
gender, too. Whether you're male or female, you'll be treated no differently

ABOVE Many missions follow a
similar pattern, asking you to
complete an elaborate obstacle
course on your way to destroy or
retrieve a given number of items,
while being attacked. Not that it
matters much when the action is
conducted at such a breathless clip.
LEFT The weapon menu handily
informs you which enemies each
gun is best used against. Fizzco's
robots can withstand a fair old
beating, but they're still no match
for an upgraded Murderang

BELOW While the combo multiplier
resets quickly, the Style meter is
slow to deplete, allowing you to
make the most of your Amps even
when both feet hit terra firma

105

ГІН J -

ГІ IB [^

the desire to use it. The frantic nature of combat and
the unyielding pace — left-trigger aiming is supposed to
slow things down, though it barely makes a difference —
means you'll feel like you're winging it, but that's all
part of the fun. Maintaining a semblance of control as
you're hurtling along carries the same kinetic thrill as

a high-speed run on Tony Hawk or SSX.

On your travels, you'll find several-dozen
score-based challenges scattered about the world, too,
exclusively focused on traversal and killing enemies.
Though often straightforward and one-note, some have
neat contextual twists. One such type is an objective-
based challenge that invites you to kill mutants in
specific ways before luring a group onto an electrified
track so an incoming train can splatter them. Elsewhere,
unlocking more powerful Amps requires you to defend
vats of Overcharge from increasingly voluminous waves
of mutants. The wooden barricades that surround the
OD’s targets will only hold up so long, so you have a
limited supply of points to spend on traps to place.
Some have whirling blades, others freeze enemies in
the immediate vicinity, spraying icy blasts across a
wider radius when you bounce upon them.

With all of its core ideas exhaustively detailed,
the game is finally free to try new things. There's an
inventive ascent that sees you firing harpoons between
two skyscrapers while under attack, and a sequence
where you're invited to set off car alarms in order to
attract mutants so that they might fight the currently
entrenched scavengers. Boss fights haven't always been
an Insomniac strength, but the examples here are
splendid: there's an on-rails battle against a giant
blimp in the form of Fizzco's mascot, which feels like

106

Multiplayer mode Chaos Squad
is accessed from any phone
booth in Sunset City. Here, you
and up to seven others engage
in a series of collaborative and
competitive challenges, voting

between two options each time:

you might assault a scavenger
fort as a team, or jostle for
supply drops to transport to a
nearby boat. Completing bonus

objectives boosts your combined

score, and contributes to a
more substantial buff for the
concluding night defence
sequence, in which it's all

but impossible to maintain
composure amid the tumult.
With a full complement, that's
eight times the explosives,
fireworks and corrosive goop
of the already hectic campaign.
But it's an entertaining mess,
and a useful one: anything you
earn or unlock can be taken
back and used in singleplayer.

From high ground, you can lure groups to take them down quickly.
Try using the Captain Ahab harpoon to spear an OD, releasing a pool of
Overcharge that attracts mutants, then dropping a TNTeddy into the crowd

a surreal remix of Super Mario Sunshine's Mecha Bowser
face-off, while another set-piece sees you attempting to
keep up with a dragon as it snakes through the city. It
might still have a weak point that requires three direct
hits to bring the beast down, but it's refreshing to face
an enemy where you're not simply having to dodge
predictable attack patterns before clamping your
trigger finger over the fire button.

And if the scattergun humour misses as often as
it hits — typically, the harder it strains for the zeitgeist,
the wider it is of the mark — the game's irreverent
treatment of death alleviates any frustration at repeated
failures. After a short loading time, you'll respawn in
one of a number of different ways, emerging from a clay
mould or a sarcophagus, or even climbing out of a TV
like Sadako from Ring. The downside to this is that
there's little sense of peril when you've got so little to
lose; indeed, with generous checkpointing that means
you'll emerge having lost seconds rather than minutes
of progress, it's often easier to just let yourself die when
you're low on health rather than struggle on with a
flashing red distraction in the top left of the screen.

Such obvious eagerness to please is laudable in
some respects, but the insistent fervour with which
Insomniac bombards the player — with colours, with
ideas, with pickups and powerups and buffs and
bonuses — means Sunset Overdrive is best approached
as you would any caffeinated energy drink. In small
gulps, it offers an exhilarating sugar rush, but too
much will leave you with a headache. As such,
it's best consumed in moderation.

PLAY

Post Script

Sunset Overdrive's clash of punk spirit and corporate culture

narchic, irreverent, edgy: Microsoft's marketing

would have you believe Sunset Overdrive is all of

these things. But it's more middle-age crisis
than teenage rebellion, its brand of corporate- approved
chaos misappropriating the concept of punk. It's an
executive wearing a Ramones T-shirt beneath a suit
jacket, inserting ‘rad’ in a PowerPoint slide, and livening
up conferences by booking the bands of his youth.

As a musical genre, punk was defined as much by its
attitude as its sound. It was about flicking two fingers
at the establishment, not giving a second thought as
to how others perceived it. Punk rock was played by
performers who considered their lack of virtuosity a
virtue. So to see it appropriated by a game made with
an extravagant budget and by a developer with no little
expertise is bizarre, not least because it's so pleadingly
keen for you to love it. It cares far too much.

That's reflected in so many aspects of the game, not
least its desperation to look the part. A good portion of
its selection of haircuts, clothing and tattoos seems to
have been sourced from a Google image search for
‘punk? and as such there's something slightly too
calculated about its wardrobe, its colours and distressed
patterns too artfully designed. It's a Guardian fashion
editor's idea of dressing down, while the stranger
options — a wolf's head, a LARPer's helmet — have
better, sillier equivalents in the Saints Row games.

Nor is punk about adenoidal mumblings and the
occasional yelp over chugging three-chord guitar
rhythms. Overdrive's soundtrack features a number of
bands — The Melvins, The Bronx — who would self-
identify as punk and yet, with a handful of exceptions,
it's painfully one-note. If the action does its best to
raise your pulse, the music seems to be endeavouring
to return your heartbeat to its resting rate.

To paraphrase Joey Ramone, punk is about being
an individual and going against the grain. You can't be
anti-establishment when your ideas don't break the
status quo, but perpetuate it. Here is a game that suffers
every bit as badly from the bloat that has afflicted its
contemporaries, that fills its world with content and
expects everyone to be impressed by its volume. It's
structured almost identically to its peers, scattering
collectibles and optional challenges throughout its
world, and featuring the levelling systems and endless
upgrades that have become de rigueur in recent years.
Its humour is a little too targeted as well. Its barrage
of pop-culture nods and self-referential winks are
mostly riffs on ideas we've seen on dozens of occasions
before, and those that aren't — a cutscene that borrows
brazenly from Cabin In The Woods, and mentions of
Reddit, GameFAQs and NeoGAF — again feel like they

There's certainly
something
amusing about
a game that
purports to be
punk featuring
a filter for bad
language

stem from its makers' keenness to demonstrate that
they share plenty in common with their audience.

Elsewhere, attempts to break the fourth wall, and to
poke fun at videogame conventions, fall into a common
trap. One early moment sees our protagonist wondering
aloud whether a nearby NPC is relevant, because there's
no icon above his head. It's a sharp little dig at a staple
of the open-world genre, but it's instantly undermined
by Insomniac slavishly adhering to it. It makes for a fine
analogy for the game as a whole, something that hints
at a desire to be different but then fails almost entirely
to follow it through. And no prizes for guessing what
follows a complaint about laborious fetchquests.

The excessive swearing, meanwhile, feels like
hollow bluster, bringing to mind Bill Grundy goading
Steve Jones to *say something outrageous" on live
television. There's certainly something amusing about
a game that purports to be punk featuring filters for
gore and bad language, presumably tailored towards
anyone playing with children present (though, in fact,
the frequent bleeps make the script's potty mouth all
the more noticeable, and funnier).

Yet that in itself is strangely subversive, an
uncommonly considerate addition in a genre that
traditionally celebrates violence and vulgarity. And it's
not the only disruptive element. Sunset Overdrive is
remarkably frank about its plot contrivances being
nothing more than flimsy excuses to send you back out
into the world to grind and bounce and shoot some
mutants. Its nonplayable interruptions cut to the chase,
rather than wasting time with shallow character
development as many of its peers would.

And its tone is decidedly unorthodox: most open-
world games are power fantasies, but this is a cartoon
that embraces its inherent silliness. There's something
delightfully old-fashioned about being rewarded with
thick wads of greenbacks when you rescue a survivor,
and likewise the way they're automatically absorbed
without your having to press a button, or even pass over
them. The game blithely refuses to make excuses for its
abundance of grindable edges, nor explain why rails and
abandoned vehicles are arranged into racing lines. There
are no cutscenes that tell you why you can suddenly
dash in midair, or bounce higher than before. You
simply can, and so you do. That's weirdly revelatory.

Moreover, in forcing its players to embrace its
unconventional methods of getting around, Sunset
Overdrive finds a crucial point of distinction. Actively
incentivising fluid movement and punishing attempts
to muddle through feels like a quiet kind of rebellion
against what we've come to expect from the open-world
genre, where absolute freedom is king. Maybe there's a
little bit of punk in Insomniac's latest after all. B

107

PLAY

LittleBigPlanet 3

ittleBigPlanet 3 is stuffed with so many ideas that

its new custodian, Sumo Digital, has seen fit to

abandon almost all of Media Molecule's tricks and
tools for its singleplayer campaign. But while the likes
of Grabinators or the Creatinator are absent in this

deliriously imaginative adventure, you won't miss them.

LBP3 may not be a long tale, but it's a generous one.

You might occasionally miss the tones of incumbent
narrator Stephen Fry, however, because the game's
expanded cast leaves less room for his soothingly well-
bred intonation. The most exciting addition is Hugh
Laurie, who plays LittleBigPlanet 3's well-meaning,
buffoonish antagonist, Newton. Among other notable
names, Nolan North, Peter Serafinowicz and Tara
Strong (whose take on a spoilt queen, in combination
with the contributions of Fry and Laurie, evokes the
spirit of Black Adder at times) all feature, voicing the
various Creators you meet along the way.

And there are other new faces in the form of three
playable heroes called Oddsock, Toggle and Swoop, two
of which are excellent additions. Oddsock bounds about
on all fours at speed and is capable of running up walls,
wall-jumping and leaping farther than Sackboy. Toggle,
meanwhile, can flick between large and small versions
of himself at will, becoming heavy and slow or light and
fast in the process. This simple dynamic is put to great
use in some inspired level design as you flick between
the two forms to tumble through the game's soft-
furnished obstacle courses. The latter of the trio,
however, is less accomplished. While he introduces
unfettered flight and his eponymous move to the
series, he's prosaic and unsatisfying to control.

Sackboy himself hasn't been eclipsed by the fresh
platforming possibilities introduced by his new friends,
either, and critics of the earlier games' approach to
physics will appreciate the tweaks in Sumo's approach.
He might be limited to a comparatively basic moveset,
but he has a range of new tools that both augment his
movement and allow him to interact with the world in
unexpected ways. Chief among these is the Hook Hat,
which allows you to grab onto and ride sweeping ‘bendy’
rails like a woolly Booker DeWitt. The Blink Ball,
meanwhile, is a headset that fires dual-purpose orbs,
useful both as a way of killing enemies and capable of
teleporting you to specially marked areas. And the
Boost Boots do much as you'd expect, enabling you to
double jump to previously out-of-reach areas.

You can select these tools — plus the Pumpinator
(a hat capable of blowing and sucking air), and a secret-
revealing torch called the Illuminator — from the new
Sackpocket, accessed by tapping Circle, which allows
you to carry multiple devices at once, rather than
relying on pick-up plinths. The ability to carry more
than one tool has allowed Sumo to engineer puzzles of
greater complexity, but the studio only touches on the

108

Publisher SCE
Developer Sumo Digital
Format PS3, PS4

Release November 18 (US), November

26 (EU), November 28 (UK)

The new Hook
Hat allows
you to grab
on to and

ride sweeping
‘bendy’ rails
like a woolly

Booker DeWitt

possibilities during the campaign — it’s down to
creative players to explore such things more fully.

In fact, you don’t even have to stick to Sumo’s
toolset, since the new Power-Up Creator allows you to
build your own devices out of any objects you choose
and, in combination with LBP3's improved logic gates,
define their properties. And if you’re feeling nostalgic,
you'll find all of Sackboy's previous equipment in the
editor — the game is compatible with millions of levels
created for the first two games, after all. Playable
characters, meanwhile, can also be extensively tweaked.
Dissatisfied with the distance you cover with Oddsock's
leap? Then add the ability to fly for his appearance in
your level. It's all part of Sumo’s effort to respond to
the needs of the creators in LBP's community, adding 70
brand-new tools and enhancing 39 returning gadgets in
a toolbox that now sports 250 pieces.

But even these profound improvements are eclipsed
by Sumo's expansion of the game's playable layers,
which rise from three to an initially dizzying 16.
Ambitious creators found ways to glitch in additional
layers in previous games, achieving the illusion of
greater depth, but being granted so much extra room
exponentially increases builders’ options. Meanwhile,
the addition of items such as slides, bounce pads, the
aforementioned bendy rails, and Veliciporters (which
spit you out at the same velocity as you enter them)
make moving Sackboy between separated layers easy.

Seasoned builders may worry that the added
structural complexity introduced by 13 additional layers
will mean that the Create mode's thermometer, which
tells you how busy your constructions are and prevents
any more building once full, would max out quickly.
But two tools — a dynamic thermometer and the
Dephysicaliser — bring the editor closer to professional
game-making tools than ever. Switching on the dynamic
thermometer means the game only renders geometry
within a definable range of the player, streaming the
rest as you approach it. Meanwhile, the Dephysicaliser
quickly switches off collision detection on foreground,
background or otherwise unreachable objects to further
reduce the load on your PlayStation's memory.

LBP3 hasn't suffered from the move to a new
home, then, and Sumo evidently understands LBP's
community every bit as well as Media Molecule does.
Yes, there are some small slip-ups along the way: our
review build occasionally suffered from long loading
times, and opening the Popit menu — an essential and
regular task — was rarely instantaneous. Even so, as a
platformer, the third numbered game in the series
certainly represents Sackboy's best, and funniest,
adventure yet. But as an accessible, powerful game-
building tool, LittleBigPlanet 3 is remarkable, and
offers more scope than we dared to expect.

Gravity can now be turned
off, or inverted, as demonstrated
in this level, which you'll spend
flipping from ceiling to floor as
you make your way up a tower.

Holding R1 makes Swoop

do exactly that, diving at speed and
allowing you to negotiate timed
sections of levels. Tap or hold X,
meanwhile, to flap your wings

Your Popit menu will rapidly fill with items, which occasionally
makes things difficult to find — especially when the cracker texture sits
in the 'polystyrene' group and the cheese one is found under 'rubber'

LittleBigPlanet 3 manages to repeat its celebrated ancestors’ achievement of steering clear of tired old traditional platforming environments in favour of more surreal, more creative settings Р-

EDGE 109

Programming this Sackbot to follow or
flee from you allows you to move it over
the switches above, releasing the doors

Sumos first full LittleBigPlanet is the series’ friendliest addition yet

ven Steven Fry's comforting voice have allowed you to vandalise story levels LBP's Create mode, providing players with the

couldn't quite take the edge off the with stickers and decorations, but LBP3's knowledge — and confidence — to get started

daunting task of getting to grips with the Contraption Challenges go much further by immediately after they graduate. Sumo adds
original LittleBigPlanet’s editing tools. While requiring that you build a vehicle in order to yet more padding to each newcomer's landing
comparatively simple next to later take part in the event at hand. Your options by asking whether players would like access to
instalments, Media Molecule's game was are limited to only a few select parts, and the the editor's advanced controls from the off, or
unlike anything before it, and the tools it vehicles themselves are built on ready-made to stick with a pared-down selection while
handed players set а new standard for console chassis, but the sense of achievement when they get settled in. Whichever you choose,
level editors. The game provided a wealth of you, for example, leap 100m farther after additions such as the dynamic thermometer
narrated video tutorials, and softened the fall tweaking the design of your long-jump buggy make it easier to create without worrying
with the intuitively designed Popit menu, but is a real rush. And, like disguising vegetables about limitations or optimising geometry —
it was still insufficient to stave off a crippling in a child's meal, such tasks get players that's something you can obsess over later on.
case of blank-canvas syndrome for many. comfortable with the basics of the creation Given the dizzying capabilities of its

With LittleBigPlanet 2, Media Molecule tools without them even noticing. editor, and the groundbreaking nature of the
gifted its community with an even deeper, Anyone bitten by the bug can head to the first game, Media Molecule did an excellent
more complex suite of tools capable of making Popit Academy. Taking place over two terms, job of condensing that power into the easily
entire games, not just levels. Simplified logic each with a handful of levels dedicated to a understandable Popit menu. And by keeping
gates and programmable Sackbots made life specific tool or family of contraptions, these Sackboy onscreen, the studio ensured that
easier for all those who had once hashed stages provide a deeper understanding of making levels always felt a lot more like play
together ad-hoc cutscenes and machines from | LBP3's most essential gadgets while couching than either coding or sculpting. But Sumo has
a befuddling array of switches and sensors, the whole process in a series of increasingly built on those confident foundations in ways
while a music sequencer allowed keen challenging puzzles. Two of LBP2's Creators that feel so natural it's hard to believe they
composers to soundtrack their creations, for return as guides, with not even a whisper weren't here from the beginning. Switching
better or worse. But while the game's tools from Fry, and cover a wide range of techniques studios partway through a series can often be
evolved, its way of teaching you didn't. from the basics of using pistons and string to detrimental, but LBP3 feels like an entirely
LittleBigPlanet 3 approaches the problem more in-depth tasks, such as wiring switches natural addition. And it seems fitting that the

differently. There are still plenty of tutorial to teleporters or adjusting the properties of injection of fresh blood on the development
videos, but Sumo has better integrated LBP's materials to make them more slippery. side looks set to open up the series to a
two halves by introducing creation elements Although we longed for another term or whole generation of players who might
to the story mode. Previous entries might two, the Popit Academy is a great on-ramp for otherwise have been put off.

110 EDGE

—— SS AND DIGITA

PLAY

Call Of Duty: Advanced Warfare

all Of Duty never felt like it was lacking a loot

system. You won't notice an opponent's hot-pink

gauntlets in the second and a half between laying
eyes on each other and one of you dying, after all, and
you can't give out powerful weaponry through random
drops in a game whose players obsess over balance. So
it proves: all 350 of Advanced Warfare's custom guns are
variations on the base weaponset, trading off a small
increase in rate of fire, for instance, for a reduction in
damage. Single-use items might boost XP gain for the
next match, or drop a Scorestreak reward a few minutes
in, but there is none of the tangible sense of progression
that the best loot games offer. It's all a bit dull.

Happily, there are plenty of thrills to be found
elsewhere. Sledgehammer may have run support on
previous CODs, but this is its first crack at the many
little problems to which Treyarch and Infinity Ward
put forward solutions biannually. For the multiplayer's
intimidating learning curve, it offers the Combat
Readiness Program, which removes killcams, doles out
Scorestreak rewards for free, and replaces the match
scoreboard with a tally of your kills, but not deaths. It's
not for us, admittedly, but it's clearly a more effective
on-ramp to competitive play. The loot system addresses
the opposite problem, encouraging those who only play
multiplayer into other modes for exclusive drops.

Yet COD's multiplayer formula is too successful
to need much tinkering. The bigger challenge for
Sledgehammer was surely how to make a singleplayer
campaign that adheres to the series’ template without
being too obvious about it. Advanced Warfare’s is, like
its predecessors, a blend of follow missions, shootouts,
setpieces and vehicle escapes. It hits all the right beats
in the right order, and as such should be boring. Instead,
this is the best singleplayer COD’s been in years.

Forty years in the future, a private military company,
Atlas, has amassed an arsenal of remarkable technical
complexity and superiority. CEO Jonathan Irons, played
by Kevin Spacey, is a head of state’s first port of call
when things get sticky. The opening mission puts this
into stark relief as you strut through trenches beneath
a passing walking tank; take cover from a swarm of
drones, then let off an EMP to take them down; and use
your Exo suit’s jetpack-like booster to dodge, double
jump, cross large gaps and break long falls. Throw a
grenade and it hangs in the air at the peak of its arc
before homing in on a group of enemies. This is clearly
still Call Of Duty, yet things are delightfully different.

Then it very nearly goes horribly wrong. The start
of the second mission follows the well-thumbed COD
design document to the letter, with a dreary midnight
rescue mission that culminates in a slow-motion
breach-and-clear section. Then the tech in your left
arm goes on the fritz, the lights come up, and you
realise you’ve been had. It’s a simulation. After a tour

112

Publisher Activision

Developer Sledgehammer Games
Format 360, PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox One
(version tested)

Release Out now

You not only
need to worry
about what's
around the
next corner, but
what might be
about to jump
over the wall

of the sprawling Atlas campus, you run the mission
again, this time with your new toys. It is a pleasure.

It’s a fine metaphor for the hours to follow, too. COD
staples play out in new ways, the annual sneaking level
replacing the ghillie suit with a cloaking device, then
introducing a scanner that can see through it. You
escape trouble across a downtown river in a craft that
can avoid otherwise fatal collisions with other boats
by diving below the surface. Sledgehammer has ideas of
its own, too. A grappling hook powers a freeform base
infiltration that feels more like an Arkham game than a
COD one, and the studio nods to its past, too, with one
tense, delicately paced section a callback to Dead Space.

Tech can’t fix everything, however. The story is
stock-in-trade COD fare, and even more predictable
than usual, though Sledgehammer at least has the
decency to get the non-twist out of the way early. It’s
disappointing, too, that after setting up its antagonist
as the enemy within — a refreshing change after so
many years of Islamic and communist threats — the
studio has Irons go to ground late on in New Baghdad.
And for all that the new gadgets enthrall, there are
simply too many of them. Sledgehammer decides what
you take into each mission, and you'll fall in love with
something only to have it promptly taken away.

Many gizmos are constants in multiplayer, but have
been toned down to ensure balance. Cloaked enemies
are still easy to spot, say, while deployable tech only
lasts seconds. The double jump is unchanged, though,
and has a huge effect, helping you escape danger or
quickly reach high ground. There's a greater emphasis
on vertical space, and it takes some getting used to; you
not only need to worry about what's around the next
corner, but what might be about to jump over the wall.

Multiplayer spans the usual assortment of modes,
most of which will be ignored as the playerbase sticks
to its annual comfort zones. Yet it is a newcomer,
Uplink, that best reflects Sledgehammer's approach to
old COD problems. T'wo teams seek to gain control of a
satellite dropped into the middle of a map and guide it
through a goal at the enemy spawn point. You can pass
it to a teammate, throw it, or simply run with it, hurling
yourself at the glimmering portal while your opponents
try to trace the arc of your double jump with their guns.
It is a game of constant, quiet heroism — the unseen
airborne shotgun blast to prevent a goal, the silent
charge for the match-winning points — and when the
round ends, winners and losers alike will be laughing.
СОР” been silly for years, really, but it's never been
made by a studio so prepared to celebrate it. T'he result
is a much-needed mechanical shot in the arm for the
most rigidly defined series on the market. Advanced
Warfare is still Call Of Duty, but it's more playful, EH
knowing and refreshing than COD’s been in years.

ABOVE The campaign is standard continent-hopping fare, albeit with a few
twists. A revitalised, Dubai-style New Baghdad is a highlight, as are a Greek
fishing town and this fraught polar expedition to retrieve a bioweapon

аташа ш T шш

TOP This is the first COD to feature
rendered cutscenes, and it's a move
that pays off. In addition to Spacey,
there's a loving treatment of the
protagonist, played by Troy Baker.
MAIN For all the desire to tinker
with convention, it wouldn't be a
modern COD if the screen wasn't
frequently splattered with jam.
LEFT The big concern with the
game's multiplayer is the potential
for exploits afforded by the
improved traversal and new tech,
and how quickly Sledgehammer is
able to respond through patches

лт SAL
no^ "aw my

PLAY

The Evil Within

ou can tell a lot about The Evil Within from its

protagonist's melee attack. Detective Sebastian

Castellanos may not have the build of a Chris
Redfield or Leon S Kennedy, but he puts plenty of force
into each punch, winding back before unleashing a
mighty haymaker. It's deliberately ungainly, designed to
leave you vulnerable for a vital second, its momentum
carrying you slightly, potentially crucially, forwards. At
the same time, it carries a satisfying weight, and it's
certainly an efficient way to break crates or obstructive
padlocks. Yet take aim at any of the humanoid horrors
you'll face in this 15- to 20-hour nightmare, and you'll
deliver little more than a glancing blow. Forget Leon S
Kennedy's skull-crushing suplexes: you're not going
to be playing this like Resident Evil 4.

Still, comparisons with director Shinji Mikami's
opus are inevitable, and they're not always wide of the
mark. As early as the third chapter you're asked to
negotiate a village populated by lumbering, disfigured
enemies who overwhelm you through sheer numbers
and aggression rather than intelligence; later, you'll
trigger the arrival of a chainsaw-wielding nightmare
who will soak up most of your ammunition before
collapsing. Suicidal foes will rush you clutching sticks
of dynamite; other threats wear protective masks to
discourage headshots. Even blowing a chunk out of an
enemy's skull isn't guaranteed to halt their advance.

Yet with supplies so scarce, at times The Evil
Within's closest relative is the GameCube remake of
Resident Evil, in part because you're encouraged to burn
corpses lest they rise again here too. It's preposterous
that Castellanos is initially capable of carrying only five
matches, but this limit plays a central role in the game's
careful resource management, and is an additional
tactical consideration during its encounters. As, too,
are the rudimentary traps found on floors and walls.
Dismantle them and you'll earn parts with which to
craft bolts for the Agony Crossbow, or you might opt to
leave them in place, luring groups of enemies towards
an explosive surprise to avoid wasting valuable rounds.

That's assuming, of course, that in the nerve-fraying
tension of a panicked retreat you can avoid blundering
into danger. Flight can often seem a more valid option
than a fight, but with with the unfit detective able to
run for only three seconds (before upgrades), you'll need
to time your sprints to perfection. A more stealthy
approach is often recommended, but Castellanos moves
so slowly when crouched that an attempted silent kill
from behind can, as often as not, result in being spotted
just as you're reaching for your knife. Every tactic is
high-risk, and mistakes are punished cruelly.

Indeed, Mikami pushes against contemporary design
boundaries to a degree that will rankle with some.

The 2:35:1 aspect ratio may have been born partly of
technical limits, but it suits the claustrophobic design,

114

Publisher Bethesda Softworks
Developer Tango Gameworks
Format 360, PC, PS3, PS4 (version
tested), Xbox One

Release Out now

Atter a clumsy
opening, The
Evil Within

hits its stride
towards the end
of the first act
and the tension
rarely lets up

purposely disempowering you by reducing your field
of vision. The camera sticks very close to Castellanos’s
back, while aiming removes him almost entirely from
view, his extended arm and current weapon all you'll
see as the focus shifts onto whatever he’s aiming at.
Such a tight, narrow view induces a sense of genuine
discomfort, heightened when you’re swarmed by several
enemies and can only really point your weapon at one.
Resident Evil 4 forced you to plant your feet before
firing. Tellingly, you’ll spend a lot of your time in

The Evil Within edging nervously backwards.

Meanwhile, its macabre story, sparked by a
brutal mass murder at a psychiatric hospital, contrives
to force Castellanos through a variety of environments,
occasionally even transforming a single space into
something entirely different. It’s both exciting and
disorienting in equal measure, and while as a result

the plot lacks a propulsive narrative drive, you’re never
quite sure what to expect next. The game finds a sweet
spot between anticipation and trepidation, the desire to
find out what’s going on just barely overcoming your
natural reluctance to face fresh horrors. Even the save
rooms rarely feel like a safe haven, the strains of
Debussy’s Clair De Lune welcoming you to a decaying
ward that feels more like a prison, or even a torture
chamber. Here, Castellanos spends green gel he’s
collected from glass jars and defeated enemies on
arsenal and ability upgrades, each one delivered by a
sharp jolt to the brain and accompanied by a shriek
that echoes unsettlingly around the peeling walls.

After a clumsy opening, The Evil Within hits its
stride towards the end of the first act and the tension
rarely lets up. A fierce siege with an AI partner and a
long trek through a mansion with rudimentary puzzles
punctuated sporadically by an indestructible enemy
suggest Mikami is occasionally happy to coast along on
past glories, though a combination of some startling
creature design and Masafumi Takada’s menacing score
do enough to compensate for moments of familiarity.
And in the terrifying Laura, a scuttling spider-woman
with a bloodcurdling scream, Tango trumps Lisa Trevor,
particularly during one masterfully orchestrated shiver
as Castellanos glimpses her silhouette climbing past a
window at the far end of a dark corridor.

A grimy aesthetic that draws from ’80s video
nasties and contemporary splatter cinema means The
Evil Within can be a gruelling, enervating journey in
places, not least when the director’s playfully malicious
streak occasionally tilts over into outright spitefulness.
But between the one-hit kills, the poor signposting,
the enforced stealth sections and the many death
traps, this is an intelligently crafted chiller, and
superior to anything Capcom has given us in the
genre since Mikami’s departure.

Headshots will crack away the protection of masked enemies, but you'll waste a few valuable rounds that way. Far better to shoot them in the leg and burn them while they're on the ground

ABOVE It's a Mikami game, which means another entry in the annals of
great videogame shotguns. A close-range blast usually results in a cathartic
eruption of gore and a moment of respite from the encroaching hordes

ABOVE There are some arrestingly
surreal sights, particularly in the
later stages. The plot can seem
scattershot at times, but it makes
for a thrillingly unpredictable ride.
LEFT This is a game more reliant on
atmosphere than traditional scare
tactics. Which isn't to say Mikami
is above the odd jump scare, of
course, but the game's few jolts
are well spaced and cannily done

PLAY

Lords Of The Fallen

espite our best efforts, we keep cycling through

our magic powers when we mean to roll beneath

an enemy's sweeping blade. It's an easy mistake
to make in a game that so closely apes its inspiration —
Lords Of The Fallen's normal and heavy attacks are
mapped to the same shoulder buttons as their Dark
Souls counterparts, after all, and the same is true of
its guard and two-handed weapon stance. But while
FromSoftware bound an evasive tumble to Circle on
PS3, Lords uses X. It's a small anomaly in an otherwise
familiar control scheme (albeit one that means we quaff
our replenishable health potions at an alarming rate
early on), but characterises the disquieting sense of
skewed déjà vu that CI and Deck13's work evokes.

That's not to say Lords doesn't have any ideas of its
own. In fact, the game is full of additions to the formula
it borrows from so heavily. Among the best of these is
an experience multiplier that ramps up with every kill
(up to a maximum of x2). It encourages you to hold on
to the points you've already gained, since depositing
your current experience in exchange for attribute or
spell points resets the multiplier. Faced with a new area,
the decision of whether to play it safe and level up or to
risk losing your entire haul in combat against stronger
enemies in the name of greed is a genuinely tough one.

To aid your survival, you can top up your health bar
and potions at checkpoints — the equivalent of resting
at a bonfire — but doing so doesn't regenerate fallen
enemies. Only dying or leaving an area and returning to
it will bring them back. But if avarice, or even hubris,
results in an untimely death farther down the line,
you'll have one chance to recover your lost experience
by fighting your way back to your ghost, a glowing light
that waits at the point of your demise. Unlike in Dark
Souls, you only have a finite amount of time to reach it,
defined by the length of your previous killstreak, before
it disappears, a mechanic gleefully designed to pressure
you into making bad decisions. In practice, you usually
have plenty of time, and once you do arrive at your
ghost it might be beneficial to leave it uncollected for
yet a little longer, since standing in its vicinity confers
a stats buff that might give you the edge in the face of
apparently overwhelming odds.

All of this is bound up in a combat system that,
while ponderous by conventional action- RPG standards,
feels sprightly in comparison to Dark Souls’ weighty,
nerve-racking encounters. Heavier weapons and armour
slow you down, of course, but even as a lumbering tank
protagonist Harkyn’s moveset will feel fluid to Souls
veterans as he strings normal and heavy attacks into
satisfying combos. The invincibility window during rolls
is generous, too (assuming you hit the right button).

Harkyn has more brutish options as well, including
parry and kick moves. And while many enemies carry
large shields that make head-on attacks ineffective,

116

Publisher Square Enix
Developer CI Games,

Deck13 Interactive

Format PC, PS4 (version tested),
Xbox One

Release Out now

There's no
sense that
you're fighting
something
intelligent or
cunning, just

awkwardly

resilient

Harkyn can stagger opponents by sprinting into them
with his own shield raised. It’s a technique that works
on many foes, even hulking ones, proving essential
when dealing with both fast-moving, simian-esque
sword fighters and mindless zombie-like creatures
that pay little heed to cautious circling.

Unfortunately, the developers undo this good work
during the game’s numerous boss encounters. Rather
than build on the dynamic combat found elsewhere,
Lords’ boss design favours simple, repetitive attack
patterns and predictable windows of opportunity. And
in a stultifying misunderstanding of what makes Dark
Souls’ boss fights special, it furnishes its gatekeepers
with towering, demoralising health bars. Beating most
of them is a case of going through the motions, staying
out of reach during each creature’s offensive routine,
and then chipping off a little vitality before backing off
— there's no sense that you're fighting something
intelligent or cunning, just awkwardly resilient.

There are other poorly implemented borrowed
ideas, not least the world itself. Labyrinthine in nature,
and interconnected by gradually discovered shortcuts,
many areas feel too samey to be mentally mapped. As
a result, navigation is a confusing, patience-sapping
endeavour. It doesn't help that Lords’ signposting is
terrible, with progress-essential information buried in
the game's poor cutscenes and not repeated elsewhere.
We found ourselves trapped in an NPC-strewn castle
for some time after missing the news that we could now
open magically sealed doors. Returning to the person
who originally divulged that information elicited no
reminder, and objective text offered no hints either.
More damningly, we spent our imprisonment
wondering whether our inability to progress was a bug,
such was the frequency of glitches we encountered
elsewhere. Enemies often become trapped in scenery
(one somehow managing to get his torso embedded in
the ceiling of a tunnel, leaving only his feet for us to
hack away at); our targeting reticule would sometimes
fail to recognise enemies entirely, especially disastrous
when facing fast-moving, powerful aggressors; and a
checkpoint failed to activate during a tough sequence.
Then there's the framerate, which flails back and
forth before plummeting in juddering protest when the
game attempts to hit its highest gears. It's a pity, given
some of the artistry evident in the game world, and it's
indicative of an ambitious team reaching beyond its
capabilities, a problem that manifests itself in both
technical and design issues. This is a game that tries to
build on FromSoftware's formidable work but comes off
feeling characterless and lacking in finesse. There's still
much enjoyment to be found in the interim grinding
between boss fights, but Lords Of The Fallen's а
greatest sin is that all feels rather soulless.

RIGHT Most boss encounters are
made more difficult by each lord's
ability to summon other enemies.
The three-legged Infiltrator forgoes
this option in favour of covering
the ground in thorny vines that
hold you in place if stepped on.
MAIN A good kick should send

this fellow over the edge, but
fighting indoors can be as much a
battle with the game's camera as
it is with the enemy you're facing.
BOTTOM The enemies and armour
on show are designed with care,
and characters bear beefy gaits
that lend weight to each violent
clash. The aesthetic reminds us a
little of Chair's Infinity Blade series

Find Kaslo

ШШ

mM Pre $ "s Se ра | №. - түт
Destroy the Lords’ Gate to Keystone
Т

з z a к қ а !
ж — s | o xi Ты ғ |
ut if vs 4 Ў К dup ң
ey 8 4 bc. Р

ABOVE Lords' world has been invaded by an undead force called the
Rhogar, whose own world must be travelled to on several occasions.
Despite the scale of individual scenes, the geography is compact

PLAY

Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth

ince the dawn of Civilization, the goal has been to
leave the world's problems behind and embark on
a new chapter for humanity in outer space. That's
where Beyond Earth begins, but it soon becomes clear
that escaping our planet is far easier than getting out of
the shadow of Alpha Centauri. Not the star system, you
understand, but Meier's beloved 1999 strategy game.
Beyond Earth is Civilization V in space rather than
Alpha Centauri 2. While that's no crime, it does make it
hard not to draw comparisons, or to feel a measure of
disappointment at its paucity of ambition and how
much less personality it contains than either of its
ancestors. It isn't just a reskin that swaps barbarians for
aliens and bans the old jokes about Gandhi getting the
A-bomb, but nor does it ever really feel like a game
about taking humanity to the next level. Where Alpha
Centauri chose to use the 4X genre as a place to explore
society and philosophy as much as warfare, Beyond
Earth is content to simply be our next battleground.
For the most part, it has to stick relatively close
to familiar concepts. Battles are fought primarily
with ever-shinier conventional weapons rather than
outlandish future nightmares, and there's a frustrating
lack of unit stacking that makes the map far fiddlier
than it needs to be. The equipment looks the part,
however, and it's not long before elements like an
orbital layer come into play, and superweapons start to
unlock. The aliens also add a novel threat — at least in
the early stages after planetfall, or if you get the ability
to deploy Siege Worms against enemy cities, or create
a few oversized xeno monsters of your own. Leave the
regular ones alone and they'll typically return the
favour, or even become friendly. Clear their nests and
at least they're kept contained. After a while, however,
native fauna is left painfully outclassed, and most are
barely even a distraction by the mid-game.
The best, most dramatic, change from Civilization
is the Affinity system. Each faction acquires points
towards a particular outlook by researching technologies
and making decisions in what are somewhat charitably
dubbed ‘quests’. Over time, they go from being entirely
uninteresting Earth-centric groups — such as the Pan-
Asian Cooperative and Slavic Federation, which are only
a squirt of easily ignored lore from being just a starting
bonus — to devotees of either Harmony, Supremacy or
Purity. Harmony factions will adapt themselves to the
planet, Purity players try to beat it back and make it as
much like Earth as possible, while Supremacy types use
Cybernetics to pull themselves into the future. They all
have a space-cult flavour, but benefit from emerging
fluidly from individual choices rather than simply being
chosen, and increasingly affect everything from the look
of cities to the nature of your troops.
This system works well, and allows for a decent
amount of flexibility, especially in conjunction with

118

Publisher 2K Games
Developer Firaxis Games
Format PC

Release Out now

Almost never
is there even
the sense of
having created
something
truly amazing
instead of
merely useful

what's normally a tech tree, but is now a tech web. The
difference is that, while initially imposing, this map of
research opportunities makes it easy to see exactly what
each node unlocks and leads to, with developments
split into branches, which represent an interest in the
field, and leaves, which are more involved projects that
master it. Engineering, for instance, unlocks Power
Systems and a Defense Grid, and along with Physics is
the way towards Robotics. Many of these also come
with Affinity points. Under Robotics, for instance,
Tactical Robotics is a Supremacy tech, while Swarm
Robotics is aligned to Harmony. Individual units
unlocked by these techs are then upgraded further by
Affinity points to create an army that will ultimately
favour one of the three sides, but you don't have to
commit up front, or go exclusively down one path. That
way lies the best toys, but there's still scope to dabble.

The catch is that this focus on Affinities largely
kills any sense of knowing the factions, each of which
seem to choose their own leaning based on little more
than a coin flip. Their leaders have little personality,
even sharing a bland script, and never play in a way
that separates, say, ARC from Brazilia or even for the
most part in a way that shows off the Affinities. Nor
is there a sense of their actions being driven by their
philosophies and backgrounds in the way Civ gets for
free due to its use of real people and real cultures, or
that Alpha Centauri achieved with its ideologically
driven factions. Here, they're cardboard cutouts.

Beyond Earth can't find a grip on Civ's ingrained
sense of wonder, either. There's a connection to
everything that happens in those games, from the
research projects to the simple pleasure of going from
spearmen to spacemen. Beyond Earth's future is, by
contrast, a dull one, offering little to discover or excite.
Its planets are so Earth-like that it's almost a surprise
to see terrain you wouldn't find over in Civ V. Its idea
of a victory, which can be anything from making contact
with a sentient alien species to returning to Earth as
a conquering force, is a still image and a paragraph of
text. Likewise, where once Wonders were worth a movie
or some art, here they're just blueprints and a quote.
Almost never is there even the sense of having created
something truly amazing instead of merely useful.

The result is a game that has no trouble inheriting
Civilization's classic ‘one more turn’ factor during an
initial playthrough, but struggles for the same claim
on ‘just one more game’ once a battle has been won —
particularly given the superiority of its own spiritual
cousin with the expansion packs installed. It's a solid,
enjoyable strategy game while it lasts, as you'd expect
from one that borrows so much from Civ V, but very
much a sidewards step for the series rather than a Dnm
bold leap forwards for its kind.

- „ COMPUTING (Z]

TOP Despite a few green clouds
and some canyons apparently

full of processed cheese, Beyond
Earth's maps do surprisingly little
to convince you that you've made
a journey to a whole other world.
MAIN The units and buildings are a
little more futuristic, but creating
and running your cities is similar
enough to Civilization V to almost
forget which game you're in.
RIGHT Early on, nests of aliens are
a big threat, but only a Harmony
player can help them stay properly
relevant to the game after a while

ABOVE The Al's deficit of character makes them tough to read and their
strategies difficult to discern. At times it can feel as if they're going to war,
refusing to make good deals, or even just ignoring everyone at random

Po Ba

PLEASE WAIT

g | H

PLAY

The Legend Of Korra

n paper, it all looked so promising: perhaps the

world's best developer of action games being

given the task of developing a tie-in for a well-
liked anime that features a powerful female lead with
a variety of fighting skills. Could Activision have found
a more ideal match here than Platinum? And yet as you
wearily hammer Square and Triangle while facing an
endgame boss with no fewer than three health bars,
you may begin to wonder how it all went so wrong.

Then again, as early as the first proper level there's
evidence of a studio short of resources, labouring
under a meagre budget and working towards an
unreasonable deadline. The animation may be smooth,
the action may be sharp and the controls may be
responsive, but the environments are horribly bland,
entirely bereft of detail and character. You'll face one
group of masked enemies, then another, and then
another, sprinting through deserted beige alleyways
in between, pausing occasionally to smash up vases,
crates, loot chests and even the odd car.

Before then, you'll get a fleeting taste of a fully
powered-up Korra before a plot contrivance causes her
to lose her ability to bend the elements to her will, a
well-worn device that serves only to exacerbate the
inherent repetition of the core combat. Naturally, Korra
explores a variety of environments over the course of
the next five hours to earn them back, though the
narrative can't be bothered to create a convincing
reason for the journey. She spends several levels
muttering something about chi blockers, sporadically
regaining her skills merely by completing objectives
in combat, such as building a high combo chain, or
dodging incoming attacks. The antagonist is simply
referred to as *that old man" for most of the game,
until he introduces himself and his master plan in a
laughable exposition barrage during the final stage.

When you're not facing the same enemies in slightly
larger numbers and different coloured jumpsuits, or
enduring some woefully rudimentary platforming,
you'll be pitted against other ‘benders’ — sub-bosses by
another name — and colossal humanoid tanks, which
take a heavy pummelling before being consigned to the
great scrapyard in the sky. Each encounter is largely
identical to the last, though the ante is upped as you
progress — if you faced one boss in an early level, you
can guarantee you'll fight two of them later on.

The game reaches its nadir during interludes in
which Korra rides her polar bear dog companion, Naga.
These borrow liberally — brazenly, even — from Temple
Run. You accelerate automatically, nudging the analogue
stick to make rapid left and right turns, collecting spirit
energy as you leap gaps, slide under low walls, and
dodge rocky obstacles. A single mistake sends you back
to the most recent checkpoint, though at least these are
generously placed; the only other saving grace is that

120

Publisher Activision

Developer PlatinumGames
Format 360, PC, PS3, PS4 (version
tested), Xbox One

Release Out now

You're on
dangerous
ground when
Yaiba: Ninja
Gaiden Z
feels like an
appropriate
comparison

RETURN TO BENDER
Complete the game on any
difficulty and you can enter

the Pro-Bending League. It's
pretty much dodgeball with
elemental powers, your trio of
benders - the Fire Ferrets —
taking on a series of rivals.

Each side of the court is split
into three zones: deplete an
opponent' energy bar and
you'll push them back; take out
all three and you'll advance into
their territory, though their
attacks will gain power the
further back they go. The game
is over when time runs out or
you knock all three opponents
off the platform. It could have
been an entertaining aside, but
since you're only ever in control
of Korra, tactics rarely extend
beyond hammering Square and
occasionally squeezing L2 to
counter an incoming projectile.

the stages are mercifully short, at least until one
maddening late-game vehicular boss fight.

Indeed, while you'd imagine the target market for
Korra would skew a little younger than Platinum's
existing audience, it hasn't toned down the difficulty
from its usual standard. Bosses have substantial health
gauges (in some cases plural) that take some time to
whittle down, and if their blows connect, you can expect
a fair chunk of your own health to disappear. Intelligent
fighting will build up your chi meter, allowing you to
deliver more powerful attacks more rapidly, but combos
are easily interrupted, and the timing for counters,
which prompt stick-pushing and button-mashing
commands, never feels quite as intuitive as it should.

To give yourself a fighting chance, you can spend
the spirit points you've accumulated on potions and an
artefact that automatically revives Korra when she falls
in battle. Alternatively, there are expensive talismans
that raise your chi meter while halving your health, or
cut your attack power in two while doubling your life,
though there's nothing permanent you can equip that
doesn't have some kind of side effect. Temporary buffs
include a speed increase, but these are so prohibitively
costly you'd do well not to rely on them. You will,
however, need a little extra help on occasion, not

least when the game throws two large bosses at you
simultaneously and the camera can't manage to keep
them both onscreen. Being hit by something you can't
see is irritating, though hardly exclusive to this game;
you know you're on dangerous ground when Yaiba:
Ninja Gaiden Z feels like an appropriate comparison.

That Korra avoids similar levels of ignominy is
entirely down to Platinum's experience as a developer
of combat systems. Though the encounters vary little,
the studio's rhythms are instantly recognisable; you'll
see it in the way a blow connects, the way moves flow
into one another. And once you've unlocked the full
extent of Korra's abilities — from the slow but forceful
Earth attacks to the blisteringly quick jabs of the Fire
powers — you can even afford to experiment a little.
Mind you, there's no real encouragement to do so until
the final boss (who sometimes erects elemental walls
around him), but once you're finally empowered to let
loose, it becomes a much better game.

That isn't enough to deflect attention away from
the fact that this is essentially ten minutes' worth of
game remixed ad nauseam at steadily escalating
difficulty to pad it out to five hours. By licensed game
standards, it's adequate enough. What makes Korra
so disappointing is that its immense potential has
been squandered, and the name of a developer with a
previously unblemished record has been tarnished.

Sure, Platinum has made flawed games before, but 4
nothing nearly so bland or as uninspiring as this.

=. | E "i Өресі
Д r

Spirit enemies replace the bog-standard masked grunts in the final
two stages of the game, but their visual quirks don't equate to them being
dispatched much differently. Winged opponents are a fresh irritant, though

@ 63,049 ,

The game suggests you lower
the difficulty if you're struggling,
but doing so means starting from
the beginning. Few, we imagine,
will bother with the Extreme mode
unlocked upon completion either.

Elemental barriers take a
long time to break. The rewards
are rarely worth the effort unless
you're short on spirit energy.

Enemies will flash red before
they're about to launch an attack.
Squeeze the left trigger just as a
blow is about to land and you'll
pull off a counter, opening your
opponent up for punishment

Я 79,638

@ 31,995

PLAY

Fantasia: Music Evolved

uilding a rhythm-action game — a genre that

usually requires precise inputs — around a device

like Kinect is fraught with risk, but Harmonix
evidently wasn't daunted by the task. Fantasia: Music
Evolved is a different proposition to Dance Central, yet
benefits from its developer's expertise with the device,
offering similarly generous gesture recognition and
an intuitive user interface. Rather than copying an
elaborate series of dance moves, here you're invited to
push, swipe and trace, matching the rhythms, basslines
and melodies of an eclectic soundtrack. Ostensibly,
you're taking the role of conductor, though the need
to keep up with fast-moving cues mean your actions
more often resemble frantic semaphore.

There's a thin narrative motivation for your flailing.
An irritating narrator and a cheerful assistant invite you
to visit a series of realms, completing objectives to rid
them of a cacophonous infection. Firstly, this involves
reaching a certain score target in a song and unlocking a
new remix. Each realm also holds a few sound toys, as
well as environmental features that can be stirred into
life by your hand. You might, for example, spin a
carousel of seahorses, before composing a jazzy drum
fill by tracing your palm over a bed of percussive clams.

The various musical toys are reminiscent of Toshio Iwai's Electroplankton,
though naturally lack the immediacy of a portable plaything — not least
because you'll need to sit through a long loading screen for each realm

Publisher Disney Interactive Studios
Developer Harmonix

Format 360, Xbox One (version tested)
Release Out now

LET'S DUET

A second player can join in by
strolling into view and shaking
player one's hand. With two,
each song is a collaborative and
gently competitive performance:
you'll both need to contribute
to composition spells, while
track switching alternates,
allowing each player to adjust
the mix to their own tastes.
Happily, you don't have to play
through the entire story to
unlock every track: while Party
mode halts your campaign
progress, you'll gain instant
access to all songs and remixes.

Collect enough magic fragments and you'll unlock
a composition spell, used to further personalise your
performance by creating looping melodies, beats and
effects that play over sections of the track. It's a setup
that favours improvisation over mastery, though it's
hard not to feel underwhelmed by the results. Pulling
individual instruments from three unlocked mixes is a
more successful idea, akin to a motion-controlled DJ
Hero with a little more creative control. Subverting
classical compositions with modern instrumentation is
entertaining, and the likes of Mussorgsky and Liszt are
as welcome on the tracklist as The Flaming Lips and
Bowie. Stirring alt-rock ingredients into Vivaldi's Four
Seasons works alarmingly well, though we think it's
going to be a long, long time before we drop dubstep
beats into Elton John's Rocket Man again.

A structure that requires you to play each song three
times to unlock its full remix potential is problematic,
but inevitably Kinect is the game's greatest strength and
most fundamental weakness. Harmonix has lowered the
challenge to compensate for potential frustration at
missed gestures, but as a result it's far too easy to get
a five-star rating on your first attempt, while the
knowledge that Kinect's whims are likely to prevent a
perfect score discourages replays. Fantasia is a novel
twist on the music game, then, but one lacking 6
the sprinkling of Disney magic its title promises.

122

The

et go. In Simogo's sixth game, this short instruction

isn't merely asking you to remove your finger from

the screen, but inviting you to submit yourself to
the sea, to be swept along by its tides. It feels like
an exhortation, too. As the fragments of the game's
narrative drift towards one another, the memories held
in the curios scattered across its islands feel ever more
like an unreliable crutch; though thoughts of the past
can help us escape, they can equally hold us captive.

The ocean you navigate is remarkably calm, the
delicate lapping of waves accompanied by the whirring
clicks of nautical equipment as you glide effortlessly
across the surface, with just a hint of resistance as you
draw clear from an island. Point your compass towards
a shore and you'll hear the wooden creak of your boat's
hull as you physically drag yourself inland. And yet as
you negotiate the old, abandoned structures that hold
the game's many small secrets, you'll drift through
them as if in a mellow reverie.

These are wonderful places to briefly inhabit,
perfectly imperfect in their arrangements, with each
carrying the quietly haunting intrigue of an afternoon
spent sifting through bric-a-brac in an abandoned loft.
Rooms, stairwells and corridors are filled with ethereal

Until now, Simogo has been known for its stylish — and stylised - 2D
visuals, but clever use of depth-of-field effects and parallax scrolling give
you the impression of exploring a fully 3D space in The Sailor's Dream

Sailor’s Dream

Publisher/developer Simogo
Format iOS
Release Out now

In a delightful coincidence, The
Sailor's Dream is the second
game this issue (along with
Fantasia) that owes a debt to
cult DS game Electroplankton.
Simogo is more than happy to
acknowledge the inspiration,
though it would be discourteous
to detail its influence here. As
with Device 6 and Year Walk,
we'd advise playing with the
volume up and earbuds in, so
you can truly appreciate the
performance from voice actor
R Bruce Elliott and other aural
surprises best left unspoiled.

whispers and chimes, as well as the gorgeous acoustic
themes of Jonathan Eng. You'll hear the musical patter
of raindrops on window panes, a gull's echoing cry, the
hiss and crackle of radio static, and a rum-soaked old
voice, weathered by time and tragedy. You may not be
a tangible presence in the world, but these places feel
lived-in, their ambience lent emotional weight by the
history attached to the objects found therein.

Yet the plot is hardly opaque. This isn't a mystery,
nor a puzzle to be solved. Rather, the key events of the
narrative take shape early on, and are subsequently
contextualised and imbued with deeper meaning. It's a
tale with a song in its heart and romance in its soul, its
wistful, melancholic reminiscences interspersed with a
note of bittersweet optimism. Other developers might
have opted for a bigger emotional punch as you finally
prepare to leave the past behind, but the subtly moving
coda here is an exemplar of storytelling maturity.

For some, a bold attempt to bridge the gap between
the game world and ours may only serve to emphasise
the distance, while the unorthodox structure may irk
those who prefer their narratives neatly packaged up.
But abandon your expectations of what a game is and
how a story should be told, and this lyrical, wilfully
elusive experience will stay with you, lingering with
the warmth and sorrow of a parting embrace. To E
give in to its spell, you just need to let go.

123

124

TIME § EXTEND

Shinji Mikami's cult sci-fi
shooter marked a rocket

powered clash of cultures

By CHRIS THURSTEN

Publisher Sega Developer PlatinumGames Format 360, PS3 Release 2010

anquish’s beginning
could be another
game's end. After a
giant space station

take fire from all corners. When the last
robot falls, a vast spider tank climbs out of
the ground. When they destroy that, it turns
into a towering humanoid mech with an

called Providence is
taken over by a
group of Russian
ultranationalists, its
microwave ray is used to annihilate San

Francisco (as if a microwave ray was ever
going to be used for anything else). In a
—— o — "sequence that's notably graphic given the
NEN сс“ nature of the game that follows, a
red beam causes the blood of everyone in the

Bay Area to boil in their veins as, inevitably,

athe Golden Gate Bridge begins its collapse.

i. explode and windscreens are smeared‏ ڪڪ
“шкі viscera; an old man is hit by a car, falls‏

off the bridge, and plummets into the
roiling, superheated ocean. Cut to the White

ee House press office as President Elizabeth

Winters (a facial and vocal match for Hillary
me ——___________
Clinton) vows to send in the marines. From

ШШ м, A fleet of US starships approaches
ML e city-sized Providence from the lunar
nearside as the game's villain, Victor Zaitsev,
issues his demands: surrender, or New York
is next. Zaitsev wears a skintight bodysuit,
eyeshadow and lipstick, giving him the
bearing of the love child of Vladimir Putin
and Robert Smith from The Cure. On board
a US carrier, Robert Burns, an eight-foot-tall
commanding officer with a mechanical arm,
briefs a crew of grunts and introduces
protagonist Sam Gideon, who stands
nearby in prototype power armour — the
unfortunately named ARS, or Augmented
Reaction Suit — smoking a cigarette and
talking via radio with his DARPA handler,
Elena, and mentor, Professor Candide.
Gideon and Burns then have a brief
slow-motion knife fight for no discernible
reason, there's an enormous battle both
inside and outside of the space station, the
carrier crash-lands in a loading bay and is
immediately set upon by an army of Russian
robots, and the player is handed control.
Vanquish rockets up its own absurdity curve
with such velocity that the inevitable
response to its intro is a kind of shell shock,
an effect only compounded by the steep
difficulty of what follows. The first proper
battle is a beachfront assault in a curving
arena where Gideon and his marine allies

eye-mounted laser weapon that can
eliminate the player in a single hit. When
that finally falls, the game begins in earnest.

This is what happens when the people
responsible for Bayonetta and God Hand
decide to try their luck at a western-style
cover shooter. Platinum's irreverence and ==-
fondness for the absurd is here presented

in a new context. Vanquish's plot is ^ AMNEM

Call Of Duty — scheming separatists, grizzled ees

sergeants, hijacked orbital weapons — but gm
Mikami’s team stretches and distorts it к —
every opportunity. Quotably awful dialogue ТТ
(“Меп, we've got eight hours to stop New
York from becoming the next San

Francisco") and oddly literary character

names (Gideon, Candide, Robert Burns) >>> >>>
جڪ‎

provide the sense of something being lost in

translation; the confidence with which e о
game presents its first of many gigantic E
robots confirms that its developers don’t 5555
much care either way. Vanquish opens with
the swagger and delirium at which Platinum
has always excelled, and it is a delight to see
that lack of respect descend upon a subject
matter so frequently po-faced and self-
serious as the military shooter.

Vanquish is the product of split
influences. Burns and his marines come
straight from Aliens, while the interior of
Providence takes after Mass Effect’s Citadel.
The game's American tech looks like it has
been lifted from Halo, while the Russian
robots and their ships are curved and alien.
Sam and the ARS suit are purely the product
of Japan, however: the suit itself takes after
mecha anime, specifically Casshern, and
rather than collect individual guns, the
player scans in new designs for an elaborate
transforming called BLADE.
Similarly, the combat merges western-style
cover shooting with the pace and high skill
ceiling that Platinum is known for, and boss
encounters draw extensively from the
eastern style guide: transforming robots,
glowing weak spots, multistage encounters.

In the hands of western developers, the
cover shooter has become emblematic of a
design philosophy that values cinematic
presentation, believable environments, №

weapon

TIME EXTEND

Because AR kicks in when

you take potentially-lethal ь. da. ФҸ
damage, you can risk open- ; ES 1

air engagements. It’s not the

best way to use the ability

sand a strong sense of the player character’s
physical embodiment in the world. The
defining image of this trend is one of Gears
Of War’s heavy-set soldiers slumped against
ڪڪ‎ a Walst-high wall, painstakingly reloading a
jammed rifle as the enemy closes in,
although you could choose examples from

Max Payne, recent GTAs or The Last Of Us.

The player is expected to identify with their

mms character and the world to the extent that

‘gameplay becomes an act of roleplay where
the fantasy is that of the survivor, the
normal person under duress. The verb set of
НЕКЕ 2 western cover shooter — crouch, aim,
shoot, move — is a means to a cinematic
M "'"emd. Your skill (or absence thereof) is
secondary to making you feel like you are
22-2 (а that the characters around you matter.
3 Vanquish, however, places player skill at
the centre of its interpretation of the cover

mms: |! HE GAME

shooter Mikami's design infuses game
elements into a genre that has displayed
diminishing interest in being seen as
gamelike, and does so as a complement to a
world defined by the absurd and surprising.
Two additions to Gideon's moveset are
at the centre of this shift, each enabled by
the technology of the ARS. Using a set of
thigh-mounted thrusters, our hero can skid
along the ground on his knees like a rocket-
powered Pete Townshend, gaining incredible
momentum at the expense of heat buildup.
Powerful melee strikes can be chained out of
boosts (briefly overloading Gideon’s
heatsinks if you choose to use them), but the
main purpose of the move is to enable
lightning-fast repositioning within each
arena. The drama of the western cover
shooter comes from the threat of being
caught in open ground. Vanquish makes play

TOP Rocket-powered sliding
forces you to reconsider how
to approach every arena.
ABOVE Like other Platinum
titles, the rush of effects
makes sense in motion

126 EDGE

IS AN ENERGETIC REJECTION
OF CAUTION, A CELEBRATION OF ACTION,
MOVEMENT AND PLAYER AGENCY

Г т 1 ağ с IE Tuc к, ~k
Б Рои. 00000300
; a

J
+100

! BONUS
, ш 1588 +200
Г. az
B cl i Е
' 3 ра ЕСЕ :
aa,

1 бааж за Ы
e] ғ. = т”

ASSAULT RIFLE -MAIN

f
1

of these moments, asking the player to пої
simply survive but to decide, quickly and
under fire, which dramatic play they are
going to make next.

The second key feature is bullet time
(here ‘AR mode’), accessed by either getting.
shot or by squeezing the left trigger while |
dodging or leaping over cover. The duration
of the effect is, again, mitigated by heat =
accumulation, but it's a vital technique, and

the only way to dodge certain boss attacks or
to survive a dense crossfire. The most
crucial thing about AR mode, however, is
that it is inaccessible while the player is safe.
There is no way to trigger it without taking
damage (which means leaving cover),
performing a diving roll (which means
leaving cover), or jumping over a waist-high
obstacle (which means leaving cover).
Vanquish is a rare example of a cover shooter
that is always encouraging you to move.
Gears Of War might dwell on the image of its
beleaguered COG, but here Mikami goes for
a more kinetic and over-the-top picture:
Gideon with one hand on the cover he has
just departed, bringing the BLADE to bear
on a squadron of Russian robots in loving
slow motion. The game is an energetic
rejection of caution, a celebration of
movement, action, and player agency.

Vanquish also provides room for degrees
of finesse on the player's part, tracked after
each encounter on a scoreboard that tallies
up your performance on fight-by-fight and
campaign-wide levels. The measure for
success in a traditional thirdperson shooter
is survival, sometimes with lots of ammo.
Here its surviving stylishly, and that
provides room for player expression not
available elsewhere. You can make progress
in the campaign by adopting a reactionary
playstyle, but a good player sets their own
rhythm in a way that mirrors the score-
attack brawlers for which Platinum is so
renowned. Boosts, AR activations, melee
attacks and dips into cover interact with the
suit's heat level in a way that creates a game
of timing and resource management. A good
player is always acting decisively to maintain
momentum. At the highest level of play, you

Тәшен ®
i
E
E
am =
mu =
Se
= a

j |
ab

385 с. > Бара

ASSAULT ЕЛДА

Overheating at the wrong
time can be fatal, but also
breaks the combat's rhythm,
forcing you to run away
until the suit fixes itself

nu ——
Bl үн КЕ e

BÜBBIE-1SN #100 7
ВОН +100
же ПЕ 8 #200

ASSAULT RIFLE

do not look at one of Vanquish’s arenas and = :

see a field of waist-high walls waiting to Ce

hidden behind, you see a course, a racetrack,
. р “С
a Rock Band fretboard: terrain to be mastered. m

The irony of vanquish is that it is а O OOOO O

antidote to a design trend that its director Aa
began. The genesis of Gears Of War and Тһе.
Last Of Us is Resident Evil 4, a Mikami game ==
that established a close thirdperson view
could be used to effectively embody the
player in the world. There's something
cathartic about seeing the designer address
the trends he started. Vanquish's message is
that if you're going to do it, do it right. It is
resolutely playful in its criticism, celebrating
the same images and ideas with which it
fiddles and breaks.

It’s appropriate, then, that a game with
such a spectacular and violent opening
should have an inexplicably silly closing
moment. After Zaitsev falls and Gideon
escapes the exploding station, the player is
asked to shoot asteroids in an interactive
score-attack credit sequence as the camera
plummets towards the Earth. Each asteroid
bears a developer's photo, and the final boss
of this sequence — and therefore the final
encounter — is a star-shaped asteroid with
Mikami's grinning face surrounded by a halo
of spinning rocks, looming closer and closer
until the player pulls the trigger and the
final scoreboard is shown. Vanquish's
beginning makes you question how seriously
its developers would like to be taken. Its
ending gives you your answer.

EDGE 127

SAVE UP TO 57% ,
- On the perfect gift this Christmas -

WITH OUR VARIED SELECTION OF TITLES YOU'LL FIND THE PERFECT PRESENT FOR THAT SPECIAL SOMEONE

РС CAMER ШТ нета

EST E

д, Р “ E]
EXDUISIVE MTER
ш vi RAED |
шы ы

SAVE UP TO 42% SAVE UP TO 46% SAVE UP TO 50% SAVE UP TO 50% SAVE UP TO 50%
FROM £19.99 FROM £18.99 FROM £20.99 FROM £20.99 FROM £17.99

а E" " 7 -
UN Àj " en А
= 1 i
ҒА М... |
The: Oo eC, млд
s ч
ЕА -
!
| WAY
DAMT
urma ат. жа
TOAL In
MORT
та

hi HALO ARRIVES
"qur ДЕА (ONG ef
час" E SLASI
E, тинч БП
SAVE UP TO 57% SAVE UP TO 55% SAVE UP TO 45% SAVE UP TO 35% SAVE UP TO 50% SAVE UP TO 50% SAVE UP TO 40%
FROM £15.99 FROM £12.99 FROM £21.49 FROM £22.49 FROM £20.99 FROM £21.49 FROM £25.49

e Save up to 57% off the cover price
e Delivery included in the price

e Over 45 magazines covering cars, film, music, technology, gaming and more
e Free gift card you can personalise to announce your gift
e Huge range of items priced under £20

e PLUS! 20% off overseas subscriptions

2 easy ways to order
Or call us on 0844 848 2852

ж myfavouritemagazines.co.uk/Z50 Quote 2504 Uas sa ono Fi Gam 8.30pm

and Sat Bam — 4pm

Savings compared to buying 2 year's worth of full priced issues from UK newsstand. This offer is for new print subscribers only. You will receive 13 issues in a year. Full details of
the Direct Debit guarantee are available upon request. If you are dissatisfied in any way you can write to us or call us to cancel your subscription at any time and we will refund you
for all unmailed issues. Prices correct at point of print and subject to change. For full terms and conditions please visit: myfavm.ag/magterms Offer ends: 31st January 2015

DISPATCHES
PERSPECTIVE

JAMES LEACH

Postcards From The Clipping Plane

Conveniently ignoring the serious side of videogame development

like to pop in and discuss a few things?”

I’m doing three projects for them at the
moment, so | said l'd be delighted to. Of
course, nothing is designed to annoy me
more. It’s winter, it's rainy, they're 140 miles
away and, more than anything, | don't want to
leave my home office. Plus it's a day l'm not
doing anything for them. Will they tack a day
onto my schedule? No. They won't even pay
my petrol. Huh. Where are the car keys?

So up | rock to their premises. The first
thing they ask about is the cute little RPG I’m
writing for. It seems the problem is the race of
little characters you meet halfway through.

"We're worried about the leprechauns,"
they say. There's nothing wrong with the
leprechauns. In fact, I’m rather pleased with
them. They're feisty and rude, but if you resist
their cheekiness, they can aid you in your
quest. The idea being that if you take
immediate offence and start hacking them
about with an axe, they die in their droves
and you don't see them again. You won't get
the map or the potions they’d supply you with.

"We think the leprechauns are a little
offensive," says the team leader. But this is the
point, | argue. You absorb that and suddenly
they like you and you'll be potioned and
mapped up before you know it. This, it turns
out, isn't the problem. The leprechauns are, in
the team's opinion, offensive to the people of
Ireland. | scratch my head at this. They don't
speak in Irish accents. The text doesn't reflect
their Emerald Isle heritage. They're not even
referred to as leprechauns in the game.

"The trouble is they're small and wear
green and have hats with belt buckles on the
front." This is not my problem - | didn't design
them. But it turns out that one of them says,
"We'll help you, to be sure." | have to change
everything l've written about them. That's the
first thing on the agenda. | make a note of it.

Next is the fictional WWillera fighter plane
game I’m also doing. None of the planes look
much like real planes, and at no point are
schools bombed. But the team don't like the

Т“ development team calls: "Would you

“It’s an English term,” they say.
True. In my work - and my life
- | use quite a few English
terms. It’s sort of a habit

fact that I’ve used the words “Tally-ho” when
you and your wingman attack. This, | explain,
is an old hunting term for chasing foxes, save-
the-badger patrols and the like.

“It’s an English term," they say. This is true.
In my work - and, frankly, my life — | use quite
a few English terms. It's sort of a habit with
me. But it turns out that, as an English term, it
might offend Germans. Yep, it's a WWillsstyle
game with planes firing machine guns at each
other. God forbid a German, or anyone,
might see a couple of old-fashioned words in it
as distressing. But | say none of this and draw
doodles on my pad as they explain that we

must remove "Tally-ho" and ideally introduce a
note of regret during attacks, since there's a
high chance that some of the enemy might be
hurt or emotionally damaged by the conflict.

The last game I'm contracted to write for is
а brightly coloured puzzle game. Frankly, it's
the best thing they're making at the moment.
There's no text for this apart from the brief,
cheerful instructions that crop up as soon as it
loads. It's a little plate-spinner affair, cleverly
set inside a series of fake websites, in which
you use little bombs to keep everything in
motion. The idea is to place these perfectly to
keep everything going as you switch between
sites. Oh no. Bombs. It’s about the bombs.
They hate the bombs. Terrorism. A world on
the brink of war.

"Now, the puzzle game," they say. l'm
ready for this and | jump in. | tell them that
instead of bombs, the explosions could be
flowers bursting into bloom. Or balloons
popping. Balloons would be good, actually,
because when the bombs burst, they fire out a
cloud of tiny bits of shrapnel, which do look
like glitter. Colourful glitter-filled balloons
would be great, as long as the colours aren't
those of the flags of a country we're currently
in a high state of tension with. Red, white and
blue would be my choice. Unless, isn't that the
Ukrainian flag colours? Anyway, the text
would only require the most minor of tweaks...

"We're not proceeding with the puzzle
game," say the boss. "We think the market
isn't really in the right place. Plus we've got
our hands full with the WWII thing, and the
non-leprechaun game.” | don’t believe a word
of it and | tell him so, because | am forthright.

The boss looks sheepish. “OK, we admit it.
Some of the websites look, er, familiar. They're
sites people might know. The sort of savvy
forum-type people who could do us a lot of
harm. We're keen not to annoy those guys."

| get it. The Internet is scary. Causing
offence is one thing, but you don't ever poke
the keyboard army.

James Leach is a BAFTA Award-winning freelance writer
whose work features in games and on television and radio

129

Illustration box-kite-curve.com |

130

#275
December 18

Internet Archive Audio

Featured

Top

Images

Featured

Top

Software

Featured

Top

Books

Featured

Top

Video

Featured

Top

Mobile Apps

Browser Extensions

Archive-It Subscription

Save Page Now

Full text of "Edge Gaming"

See other formats